In just 132 pages of text, the book covers the AIDS waterfront, though I suspect the volume's greatest appeal will be for those, like me, who come to the issue from a non-medical, non-scientific background and whose focus is Africa. Most of the book looks at the socio-economic components of AIDS and most of the examples are from southern Africa where, after all, the pandemic is at its most devastating and the needs are greatest. If prevention is universally needed, if all AIDS patients need proper treatment, good nutrition and adequate care, southern Africa needs more of everything, urgently and desperately.

While underlining Canadian people’s best intentions for the African continent, Gerald Caplan argues that his country and the rest of the Western world should understand that many existing practices around trade, aid, lending, investment, and recruiting in relation to Africa cause far more harm than good. Without an approach that goes beyond mere compassionate humanitarianism, the author stresses that the efforts of millions of courageous African social activists will be in vain.

There is a widespread assumption among rich countries that Africa is the problem and that we in the rich world are the solution. This book turns this complacent, conventional wisdom on its head. It argues that the policies of rich countries, though couched in benevolent terms, are in fact responsible for many of the ills in Africa... For Africa to move forward, the citizens of rich countries must be aware of the false premises on which their own leaders deal with Africa.

Last week the world remembered the 12th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Gerald Caplan argues that understanding about the real causes of the genocide remains limited, while the world’s superpowers continue to act in their own self-interest when it comes to other genocides.

Twelve years after perhaps a million defenseless Rwandans were slaughtered for the sin of being Tutsi, Rwanda's genocide has at last become widely known. As people around the world commemorate this week the 12th anniversary of the genocide, the phrase "Another Rwanda" joins the wildly ignored "Never Again!" to reflect the world's apparent abhorrence of genocide—the ultimate crime of crimes. Anyone who thinks this augurs well for the future of humankind is dead wrong.

There are three critical realities that both these neat little phrases obscure: Few really understand what actually happened in Rwanda in 1994. A pernicious campaign to deny that genocide continues to unfold. And it IS happening again before our eyes.

Thanks to a modest production of movies, documentaries and books since the 10th anniversary, the genocide is far better known now than it was even while it was at its bloodiest. Far and away the most important vehicle has been the mainstream film "Hotel Rwanda", seen by millions and widely available on CD. The problem is what these large audiences learned from "Hotel Rwanda." Yes, it made clear that the minority Tutsi people were attacked viciously by the majority Hutu and that the world at large failed to intervene.

Yet the lasting impression surely is that some Hutu Africans were sadistically massacring some Tutsi Africans for no good reason. No one viewing the film alone would have grasped that this was no mere barbaric tribal eruption based on primitive ancient hatreds. This was a carefully planned and executed conspiracy by a group of sophisticated, westernized, greedy men and women for the purpose of ensuring their continued power and privileges. That's not a savage African phenomenon - that's a universal human phenomenon.

Nor is the critical, destructive role of outside forces evident in "Hotel Rwanda". No viewer would learn that the hatred between the two groups had largely been invented and inculcated over a century ago by the powerful Roman Catholic Church in Rwanda. They'd know nothing of the responsibility of the Belgian government for the deep, ultimately deadly, division between Hutu and Tutsi. They'd be blissfully unaware that the government of France was complicit in the genocide and has never to this day accepted any responsibility. Indeed, without a century of western interference, there'd have been no genocide as we know it. And had western governments cared one iota, they could easily have prevented the entire genocidal conspiracy from being executed. The world knows everything about Rwanda except what really matters.

What's even worse are the insidious forces at work that brazenly deny that there ever was a genocide launched by Hutu extremists against the Tutsi. Another unwelcome lesson in human nature: There are always deniers. There are always David Irvings and Ernst Zundels, who for their own sordid or pathological motives deny what can't be doubted. In Rwanda's case, it's an unholy coalition of Hutu genocidaires who want to complete the extermination of the Tutsi, whites in Belgian and France who had privileged access to the pre-genocide Hutu government, conservative Christian politicians in Europe, and a motley cast of characters around the world (including Canadians) with diverse, perverse, sometimes inexplicable motives.

For the survivors of 1994, and for the families of the victims, denial creates a second unbearable hurt, making an already difficult healing process far more painful and prolonged. And it's all based on lies and distortions. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable: To deny the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda is the equivalent of denying the Holocaust, and all who do so should be treated accordingly.

Finally, despite Rwanda, there remains Darfur. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on the world to assure that Darfur, the besieged western area of Sudan, doesn't become "another Rwanda". Unlike Rwanda, all the world knows what's happening in Darfur, so the excuse of ignorance, as in Rwanda, doesn't hold. Unlike Rwanda, Darfur has been formally labeled a genocide by the Bush administration and both Houses of the American Congress.

Yet three years since the Darfur crisis erupted, the world's reaction has been pitiful. The all-powerful permanent members of the Security Council - China, Russia, the US, France - have perfectly good reasons of crass self-interest to allow hundreds of thousands of Darfurians to die, countless women raped, millions forced to flee to squalid camps. Three years after it exploded, the situation in Darfur continues to deteriorate drastically. "Another Rwanda", indeed.

What are the real lessons of Rwanda and Darfur? They are surely inescapable. Those of us who demand interventions on humanitarian grounds - in Rwanda, Darfur, northern Uganda - will continue to be ignored. When western powers do intervene, we can be sure that dubious geopolitical and hegemonic interests are the driving force. We'll have many more Rwandas; we can count on it.

* Gerald Caplan has written frequently about the Rwandan genocide and genocide prevention.

* Please send comments to

What lessons did the international community learn from the Genocide in Rwanda ten years ago, especially in relation to the crisis in Darfur? Gerald Caplan, an expert on the Rwandan genocide, charts the response of the international community in Rwanda and then discusses what the response has been in Darfur. Once again, the international community, with key players only able to serve their various economic and strategic interests, have shown a scandalous disregard for human life and failed to act and prevent genocide.

(See French version below)

Even before the 1994 Rwandan genocide ended, some began wondering when "the next Rwanda" would be. Not "if", but when. Despite Indonesia in 1965, Burundi in 1972 and Cambodia from 1975 to 1978, genocide had receded in the public consciousness. From the late 1960s, it's true, memory of the Holocaust was in full bloom. But the Holocaust was treated as almost a self-contained phenomenon separate from "ordinary" genocide. The earlier Armenian genocide was mainly the crusade of Armenians, the Hereros' extermination was unknown beyond a few experts. As for the post-Holocaust massacres of half-a-million Chinese and Communists in Indonesia, the slaughter by the Tutsi army of perhaps 200,000 Hutu in Burundi, including all those with secondary education, and the deaths by beating, starving or torture by the Khmer Rouge of a million and a half Cambodians, none quite seemed to meet the standards set down in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (UNCG).

Rwanda was different. Rwanda was a classic UNCG genocide, fulfilling all the conditions, and it reminded the world that a half century after the world first vowed "Never again," genocide had not disappeared. What Primo Levi had said of the Holocaust was now said about Rwanda: It happened, so it will happen again. For some, it happened soon enough. For them, Srebrenica in 1995 seemed "another Rwanda", and indeed, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia eventually decided that the murder of 8000 Muslim Bosnian males by Bosnian Serb militias was indeed genocide. But this has been a controversial issue. Cold-bloodedly murdering 8000 Muslim Bosnians was beyond question an egregious war crime, even a crime against humanity, but, some wondered, how could it belong in the same category as killing 1 ½ million Armenians or six million Jews?

Rwanda, however, left no room for ambiguity. Ironically, the seeming absence of genocide since 1945 had made most observers refuse to take seriously in advance that an actual genocidal conspiracy was being hatched in Rwanda before 1994. Once it was over, it seemed all but inevitable that others could, would, follow. For many, early in the new millennium, Darfur seemed well on its way to becoming "the next Rwanda". The urgent question then emerged: Had Rwanda taught the world any lessons that might help prevent Darfur from following in its place?

Three lessons from Rwanda

Assuming of course that there really are any lessons at all that the past can teach the future, it is possible to isolate three from the unmitigated catastrophe of Rwanda in 1994. Of these, the first and most obvious is profoundly disheartening to all those who favor intervention in crises where no interests beyond the humanitarian are at stake. The second and third are apparently, or potentially, encouraging. To seek a ray of hope out of a genocide borders on the desperate, but in the curious universe of those who study genocides in order to prevent them, what else is there to hold on to?

The horror of the Rwandan genocide extends beyond its intrinsic bestiality. What's also notable is, first, how swiftly it became evident that this was a perfect storm of a genocide, and, second, how easily it could have been prevented. (Before addressing the betrayal of Rwanda by the "international community", genocide prevention activists must not forget that it could have been prevented most successfully if the Hutu conspirators who plotted to "cleanse" Rwanda of its Tutsi citizens had simply called off their plot.) Yet the genocide was not formally named as such by the vast majority of governments and institutions, including the United Nations and Organization of African Unity, until the 100 days of slaughter had virtually come to an end. Moreover, not only was the genocide not prevented, it was not even marginally mitigated. From the first day to the last, not a single reinforcement arrived in Rwanda to bolster the puny UN force of 400 that was trying desperately to save the relatively few Tutsi that it could.

Thus, the first lesson from Rwanda: the harsh unwelcome reminder - as if the world needed another - that the global powers-that-be are capable of almost infinite callousness and indifference to human suffering if geopolitical or political interests were not at stake. Calls for forceful intervention bases strictly on humanitarian grounds, as we have learned the hard way once again in Darfur, are simply irrelevant to those with the means to intervene.

Here I refer essentially to the Security Council, and within that body to the remarkably powerful five Permanent Members (P5) who alone hold a veto over all its resolutions. Since UN missions can only be authorized by the Security Council, and since any one of the P5 can veto any resolution, the leverage of the US, Britain, France, Russia and China can hardly be exaggerated. Those who have begged for a more assertive response in both Rwanda and Darfur understand the immutability of this phenomenon.

Often, middle powers are looked to as a means to exert pressure on the inner sanctum of the P5. Canada, northern Europe and the Scandinavian countries are all seen, sometimes naively, as being less in the thrall of self-interest and more open to humanitarian projects. In trying to leverage action for Darfur, activists placed considerable hope on these countries. The role of Belgium in 1994 shows both the leverage that a middle power can play and the perverse use it can make of that leverage.

For 110 years prior to the Rwandan genocide, no external power played a more deplorable role in Africa than Belgium - a tiny country responsible for giant crimes against humanity. Its impact on the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi was catastrophic. The turbulent history of the entire Great Lakes region in the 20th century would have been profoundly different if it had not been for Belgian colonial rule. Now, just as the genocide was exploding across Rwanda, the Belgian government sought to bring pressure on the Security Council to withdraw in its entirety its 6-month old UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). Ten of Belgium's UN troops had been murdered by Rwandan government soldiers less than a day after the genocide was triggered by the shooting down of the Rwandan president's plane. The Belgian government decided it was politically impossible for its troops to remain in Rwanda. Their withdrawal very substantially undermined UNAMIR's capacity, and its lethal consequences are not merely theoretical. It immediately and directly led to the death of some 2500 Rwandans being protected by Belgian troops at the Ecole Technique Officielle (ETO) school compound in the capital, Kigali. At least the Belgian government had the good sense to feel humiliated by the decision to abandon Rwanda at its moment of greatest need, and sought to cover its guilt by convincing the entire world to share its culpability.

To the everlasting sorrow of Rwanda, the Belgians found the Administration of US President Bill Clinton ready and willing. Largely for their own entirely short-term partisan reasons, with pathological UN-hating Republicans breathing down their necks, the Clintonites were unprepared to have anything whatever to do with sending a new UN mission to a tiny African country which, as is invariably said, almost no American could even find on a map. Among the P5, France was the only country genuinely concerned about Rwanda for its own perverse reasons of francophone solidarity, and it was stealthily seeking a way to intervene on behalf of the Hutu extremist genocidaire government. It was left to the US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, to lead a vigorous movement in the Security Council to literally decimate UNAMIR's 2500-odd force. Britain, for reasons British journalist-historian Linda Melvern is still trying to unravel, fell in solidly behind the Americans. Russia and China were largely uninterested, a situation that would change significantly in the case of Darfur. At the end of the genocide's second week, with an estimated 100,000 or more Tutsi and almost all prominent moderate Hutu already dead, and the genocide gaining daily momentum, the Security Council voted to reduce the UNAMIR mission to 250 men. Force Commander Romeo Dallaire, furious and sick at heart, disobeyed this explicit instruction and managed to retain 400 men for the duration of the genocide.

Even now, it is impossible to recapitulate these events without feeling they cannot possibly be true. But as virtually all authorities on the subject agree, and as the Security Council's reaction to Darfur a decade later make entirely plausible, they were only too true, and their lesson was clear. There seemed barely any depths to which the "international community" would not sink if it deemed them necessary to its own national interests, even if that interest was nothing more nor less than, in Belgium's case, covering up a cowardly abandonment of a people at ultimate risk, or for the US, winning an impending election. Political expediency was all, and human need seemed completely irrelevant.

However, two other lessons of the international reaction, distressing as they were at the time, seemed to offer a certain hope for intervention in future crises. First were the lies told by both US President Bill Clinton and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in later apologizing for their inaction during the 100 days. Both claimed that they were insufficiently aware of the situation at the time. These claims, on the part of both men, have been repudiated beyond a shadow of a doubt. They knew everything, or at least everything they wanted to know. Nevertheless, their very disingenuousness permitted the inference that the next time "another Rwanda" loomed, if it could attain a sufficiently high public profile, the Security Council would have lost the excuse of ignorance and have little alternative but to intervene. This apparent truth initially gave heart to the movement to intervene in Darfur.

Second, as already noted, almost no one in an official position at the time agreed to characterize Rwanda as a genocide and, led again by the Clinton administration, actually denied that a genocide was in fact in progress. This refusal to affirm the obvious was again tied directly to the Clintonites' electoral fears. Government lawyers studying the 1948 Genocide Convention appear to have decided that accepting the genocide label would trigger a major obligation on the administration to intervene actively. That such an interpretation was highly debatable is neither here nor there. It was perfectly possible to argue that a mere Security Council resolution satisfied the wording of the UNCG. But Clinton's advisors chose not to adopt this reading. Their judgment powerfully affected Clinton's public stance.

Television captured a moment of true self-debasement when a US State Department spokesperson, a certain Christine Shelly, tried to explain to reporters that Rwanda was the scene of "acts of genocide" but not of genocide. When pushed to indicate how many "acts of genocide" constitute one full genocide, Ms. Shelly, obviously humiliated beyond words, explained that she wasn't authorized to deal with that question. (To her everlasting chagrin, several documentaries on the genocide include footage of her disastrous performance, unforgivingly immortalizing her forever.) The difference between this pathetic moment and subsequent American reactions to Darfur under President Bush could hardly have been more glaring.

And indeed, Clinton's position that there was no full-blown genocide in Rwanda unwittingly provided the glimmer of hope out of an act of unsurpassed political opportunism. If Rwanda was "not quite" a genocide, and therefore intervention was not obligatory, it surely followed logically that if a genocide were declared in future, would it not mean that intervention was mandatory, inescapable? That logic, combined with the prospect that if a disaster was well-enough publicized, the world would have little choice but to move in, offered some real hope that the "next Rwanda" would not be betrayed and abandoned as the original Rwanda had been.

The next Rwanda

Then came Darfur. Less than a decade after Hutu Power was defeated, the world had found its "next Rwanda". It is irrelevant to my argument that serious genocide authorities disagree about whether the conflict is a genocide or not. All agree that it had many of the dimensions of a genocide, that it is an appalling catastrophe, and that robust intervention is demanded. As we know, no such intervention has occurred, and as this is written early in 2006, the situation seems to have deteriorated substantially and become even more complex - the almost inevitable consequence of the world's meagre response to date. From the point of view of the hopes raised by two of the optimistic lessons from Rwanda, the response of the "international community" to the crisis in Darfur can only be considered a giant, tragic set-back. It is not too much to say that Darfur shows that only the first despairing lesson - the bottomless cynicism and self-interest of the major powers - -remains valid, while the hopes have been largely destroyed.

After all, by the middle of 2004, at the very latest, everyone who counts knew that an overwhelming political and humanitarian man-made disaster had befallen western Sudan. On April 7, when he rightly should have been in Kigali for the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Kofi Annan was instead in Geneva unveiling a new five-point plan for genocide prevention and announcing that the world must not permit Darfur to become "another Rwanda". Everyone who counts soon either visited Khartoum to plead with the Government of Sudan that was orchestrating the crisis, or popped in at a displaced persons or refugee camp in Darfur or across the border in Chad. When Annan and Colin Powell make a stop somewhere, you know that it's already a major story. It may not have competed with the Michael Jackson trial, but even in the mainstream media, Darfur stories, features and opinion pieces were remarkably common for a crisis so remote and complex.

The crisis in Darfur, in other words, was fairly big news. This was unlike Rwanda. Clinton and Annan knew all about Rwanda, but media coverage for many weeks was both minimal and distorted ("tribal savagery") so the public remained largely uninformed. Yet despite Darfur's profile, the Security Council was effectively paralyzed by the conflicting interests of the veto-casting P5. This time China, thirsty for Sudan's oil, and Russia, anxious to sell arms to a genocidal government, also played spoiler roles. The Council passed a series of powder-puff resolutions each threatening the killers in Khartoum that if they did not rein in their Janjaweed forces, they would be forcefully confronted with - yet another resolution. Perhaps not since a representative of Rwanda's genocidaire government retained his position on the Security Council through the entire 1994 genocide has the Security Council appeared to be more of a joke than over Darfur.

The role of the United States

Yet there was another reason for hope. Pushed by an unlikely coalition of domestic pressure groups, the US Congress and Executive publicly declared that Darfur constituted a genuine genocide under the 1948 Convention. Such a radical and dramatic step was unprecedented in American history. Both chambers of Congress hastily and unanimously passed their own resolutions declaring Darfur to be a genocide with barely an explanation, let alone debate, and President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell each eventually followed with their own concurring declarations. To the genocide prevention community, this seemed the moment they had so long dreamed of and planned for. What would be the point of making this declaration unless significant action was being planned? It was true the Bush government, and others, were modestly generous in providing humanitarian aid to the displaced and the refugees as well as funding for the Africa Union Mission to Darfur. But now, surely, with these declarations, was the long-awaited moment of qualitative escalation. Now we would see the kind of forceful intervention denied Rwanda and that was crucial if the travesty in Sudan was to be ended.

In fact, all that was needed was to pay heed to the second part of Colin Powell's statement before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Yes, the US had decided, upon looking at evidence it had specifically commissioned - the exact opposite of Rwanda - that a genocide was taking place before the eyes of the world. Powell had no doubt what the world expected next, and said so explicitly: "Mr. Chairman, some seem to have been waiting for this determination of genocide to take action. In fact, however, no new action is dictated by this determination. We have been doing everything we can to get the Sudanese government to act responsibly. So let us not be preoccupied with this designation of genocide. These people are in desperate need and we must help them. Call it a civil war. Call it ethnic cleansing. Call it genocide. Call it 'none of the above'. The reality is the same: there are people in Darfur who desperately need our help." (US Department of State, "The Crisis In Darfur," Written remarks before the Senate FRC, Washington, DC, September 9, 2004).

How was this possible? Had the historic declaration of genocide been nothing more than an opportunistic political ploy by the Bush administration to assuage some domestic pressure groups? Could even the Bush neocons be so cynical as to play politics with genocide? If not, how could this wholly unanticipated development be explained? How could the esteemed Colin Powell participate in this destructive exercise which has done so much to debase the currency of the Genocide Convention?

Within mere months of the American government's determination of genocide in Darfur, a new Bush administration betrayal of Darfur was exposed. First came the revelation that the CIA had sent a plane to Khartoum to ferry the head of Sudanese intelligence, General Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington for discussions with his American peers on the "war against terror". Sudan, it appears, had become "a crucial intelligence asset to the CIA." (Suzanne Goldenberg, "Ostracized Sudan emerges as key American ally in 'war on terror'," Guardian Weekly, May 6-12, 2005.) Never mind that General Gosh's name is widely assumed to be among the 51 leading Sudanese officials named by the UN-appointed International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur. The "war on terrorism" obviously trumps genocide.
Later we learned just how close this tie really was. In October 2005, Guardian reporter Jonathan Steele reported the following:

"Question: When do Bush administration officials cuddle up to leaders of states that the US describes as sponsors of international terrorism? Answer: When they are in Khartoum. I know because I saw it the other day…. We were attending the closing dinner of a 2-day conference of African counter-terrorism officials, to which the US and UK were invited as observers. The western spooks were less than happy to have the western press on hand, especially as their names were called out. But loss of anonymity was a small price for the excellent cooperation both agencies believe Sudan is giving to keep tabs on Somali, Saudi and other Arab fundamentalists who pass through its territory…. [The dinner] was in the garden of the headquarters of Sudan's intelligence service, not far from the Nile. Up stepped a senior CIA agent. In full view of the assembled company, he gave General Salah Abdallah Gosh, Sudan's intelligence chief, a bear hug. The general responded by handing over a goody-bag, wrapped in shiny green paper. Next up was the [British] M16 official, with the same effusive routine." (Jonathan Steele, "Darfur wasn't genocide and Sudan is not a terrorist," Guardian, October 7, 2005.)

There are still Darfur activists who believe that despite close working relationships between the Bush administration and precisely those Sudanese leaders against whom the International Criminal Court intends to issue warrants, the US can still be relied on as an ally in pressuring Khartoum to end its war against the Fur and other Africans. I wish I could agree. The Khartoum government is as canny as it is treacherous, and blithely uses its leverage to continue getting away with murder in Darfur. It now has trump cards with the Americans, the Chinese and the Russians. Those of us who urge intervention on strictly humanitarian grounds have no comparable influence whatever. The result is virtually pre-ordained: the death and rape and suffering in western Sudan will continue.

Are there now lessons from Darfur, having seen that the only lesson from Rwanda that proved relevant was the most despairing one? It is almost too disheartening even to ask. But for those committed to genocide prevention or to interventions on strictly humanitarian grounds, tough questions must again be asked, creative new directions and mechanisms sought. The alternative is too ghastly to contemplate.

* Gerald Caplan has a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the Rwandan genocide; founder of "Remembering Rwanda"; and co-editor with Eric Markusen of a special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research devoted to the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. He teaches a course on the genocide to Rwandans in Rwanda.

* Please send comments to

De Rwanda à Darfur: Leçons Apprendu?
Gerald Caplan

Quelles leçons la communauté internationale a-t-il appris du Génocide dans Rwanda il y a dix ans, surtout par rapport à la crise dans Darfur? Gerald Caplan, un expert sur le génocide Rwandais, trace la réponse de la communauté internationale dans Rwanda et discute alors que la réponse a été dans Darfur. De nouveau, la communauté internationale, avec les joueurs clés seulement capable de servir leurs intérêts divers, économiques et stratégiques, a montré une indifférence scandaleuse pour la vie humaine et n’a pas agi et empêcher le génocide.

Même avant que le génocide Rwandan 1994 a fini, certains ont commencé à se demander quand "le Rwanda suivant" serait. Pas "si", mais quand. Malgré l'Indonésie en 1965, le Burundi en 1972 et le Cambodge à partir de 1975 à 1978, le génocide s'était éloigné dans la conscience publique. À partir de la fin des années 1960, c'est vrai, la mémoire de l'Holocauste était dans l'éclat complet. Mais on a traité l'Holocauste comme presque un phénomène indépendant séparé du génocide "ordinaire". Le plus premier génocide arménien était surtout la croisade d'Arméniens, l'extermination de l'Hereros était inconnue au-delà de quelques experts. Quant aux massacres de post-holocauste d'un demi-million de chinois et de Communistes en Indonésie, l'abattage par l'armée Tutsi de peut-être 200,000 Hutu au Burundi, en incluant tous ceux avec l'enseignement secondaire et les morts en battant, en mourant de faim ou la torture par le Rouge à joues Khmer d'un million et demi Cambodgiens, personne n'a tout à fait semblé rencontrer les normes déposées dans la Convention 1948 sur la Prévention et la Punition de Génocide (UNCG).

Le Rwanda était différent. Le Rwanda était un génocide UNCG classique, en réalisant toutes les conditions et il a rappelé au monde qu'un moitié de siècle après le monde d'abord juré "Jamais de nouveau," le génocide n'avait pas disparu. Que Primo Levi avait dit de l'Holocauste on a maintenant dit du Rwanda : Il est arrivé, donc il arrivera de nouveau. Pour certains, il est arrivé assez bientôt. Pour eux, Srebrenica en 1995 a semblé "un autre Rwanda" et effectivement, le Tribunal Criminel international pour ancienne Yougoslavie a finalement décidé que le meurtre de 8000 mâles Bosniaques Musulmans par les milices serbes Bosniaques était effectivement le génocide. Mais cela a été une édition controversée. Le fait d'assassiner à sang-froid 8000 Bosniaques Musulmans était indiscutablement un crime de guerre énorme, même un crime contre l'humanité, mais, certains se sont demandés, comment pourrait-il appartenir dans la même catégorie que le meurtre 1 ½ le million d'Arméniens ou de six millions de Juifs ?
Le Rwanda, pourtant, n'a quitté aucune pièce pour l'ambiguïté. Ironiquement, l'absence apparente de génocide depuis 1945 avait fait la plupart des observateurs refuser de prendre au sérieux à l'avance qu'une conspiration génocide réelle était faite éclore au Rwanda avant 1994. Dès que c'était fini, il a semblé presque inévitable que d'autres puissent, suivre. Pour beaucoup, tôt dans le nouveau millénaire, Darfur a semblé bien sur sa voie à la formation "le Rwanda suivant". La question urgente a alors émergé : le Rwanda avait-il enseigné au monde des leçons qui pourraient aider à empêcher Darfur de suivre dans son endroit ?

Trois Leçons De Rwanda

En supposant évidemment qu'il y a vraiment n'importe quelles leçons à tout que le passé peut enseigner l'avenir, il est possible d'isoler trois de la catastrophe non mitigée du Rwanda en 1994. De ceux-ci, le premier et le plus évident démoralise profondément à tous ceux qui préfèrent l'intervention dans les crises où aucun intérêt au-delà de l'humaniste n'est en jeu. Les deuxièmes et troisième sont apparemment, ou potentiellement, encourageants. Chercher un rayon d'espoir d'un génocide touche le désespéré, mais dans l'univers curieux d'entre ceux qui étudient genocides pour les prévenir, qu'est-ce qui doit là s'agripper ?

L'horreur du génocide Rwandan s'étend au-delà de sa bestialité intrinsèque. Ce qui est aussi remarquable est, d'abord, comment rapidement il est devenu évident que c'était une tempête parfaite d'un génocide et, deuxièmement, comment facilement il pourrait avoir été prévenu. (Avant qu'en adressant la traîtrise du Rwanda par la "communauté internationale", les activistes de prévention de génocide ne doivent pas oublier qu'il pourrait avoir été prévenu le plus avec succès si les conspirateurs Hutu qui ont conspiré pour "nettoyer" le Rwanda de ses citoyens Tutsi avaient simplement rappelé leur complot.) Pourtant le génocide n'a pas été officiellement appelé à ce titre par la majorité vaste de gouvernements et d'institutions, en incluant les Nations Unies et l'Organisation d'Africain Unity, jusqu'à ce que les 100 jours d'abattage soient pratiquement venus à une fin. De plus, pas seulement le génocide n'a pas été prévenu, il n'a pas été même très légèrement atténué. À partir du premier jour au renforcement dernier, pas un seul arrivé au Rwanda pour renforcer la force chétive de l'ONU de 400 qui essayait désespérément de sauver le relativement peu de Tutsi qu'il pourrait.

Ainsi, la première leçon du Rwanda : le mémento importun dur - comme si le monde a eu besoin d'un autre - que les "pouvoirs globaux qui être" sont capables de dureté presque infinie et d'indifférence envers la souffrance d'humain si geopolitical ou les intérêts politiques n'étaient pas en jeu. Les demandes de l'intervention énergique basent sévèrement sur les terres humanitaires, comme nous avons appris la voie dure de nouveau dans Darfur, sont simplement hors de propos à ceux avec les moyens d'intervenir

Ici je fais allusion essentiellement au Conseil de sécurité et dans ce corps aux cinq Membres Permanents remarquablement puissants (P5) qui seul tiennent un veto sur toutes ses résolutions. Puisque les missions de l'ONU peuvent seulement être autorisées par le Conseil de sécurité et puisque n'importe lequel des P5 peut interdire n'importe quelle résolution, la force d'appui des Etats-Unis, la Grande-Bretagne, la France, la Russie et la Chine peut à peine être exagérée. Ceux-là qui ont mendié pour une réponse plus assurée tant au Rwanda qu'à Darfur comprennent l'immuabilité de ce phénomène.

Souvent, les pouvoirs du milieu sont comptés comme un moyen d'exercer la pression sur le sanctuaire intérieur du P5. Le Canada, Europe septentrionale et les pays scandinaves sont tous vus, quelquefois naïvement, comme étant moins dans la servitude d'intérêt personnel et plus ouverts aux projets humanitaires. Dans l'essai d'exercer une influence sur l'action pour Darfur, les activistes ont placé l'espoir considérable sur ces pays. Le rôle de la Belgique en 1994 montre tant force d'appui qu'un pouvoir du milieu peut jouer que l'utilisation perverse qu'il peut faire de cette force d'appui.

Depuis 110 ans avant le génocide Rwandan, aucun pouvoir externe n'a joué un rôle plus déplorable en Afrique que la Belgique - un pays très petit responsable des crimes géants contre l'humanité. Son impact sur le Congo, le Rwanda et le Burundi était catastrophique. L'histoire turbulente de la région de Grands Lacs entière au 20ème siècle aurait été profondément différente s'il n'avait pas été pour la règle coloniale belge. Maintenant, de même que le génocide explosait à travers le Rwanda, le gouvernement belge a cherché à peser sur le Conseil de sécurité pour retirer dans son ensemble sa vieille Mission d'Assistance de l'ONU de 6 mois pour le Rwanda (UNAMIR). Dix des troupes de l'ONU de la Belgique avaient été assassinées par les soldats gouvernementaux Rwandan moins d'un jour après que le génocide a été déclenché par le meurtre en bas de l'avion du président Rwandan. Le gouvernement belge a décidé que c'était politiquement impossible pour ses troupes de rester au Rwanda. Leur retrait a très considérablement sapé la capacité d'UNAMIR et ses conséquences mortelles ne sont pas simplement théoriques. Il immédiatement et a directement causé la mort d'environ 2500 Rwandans être protégé par les troupes belges à la Technique Ecole Officielle (ETO) l'enceinte scolaire dans la capitale, Kigali. Au moins le gouvernement belge avait la raison pour se sentir humilié par la décision d'abandonner le Rwanda à son moment du plus grand besoin et a cherché à couvrir sa culpabilité en persuadant le monde entier de partager sa culpabilité.
Au chagrin éternel du Rwanda, les Belges ont trouvé l'Administration du Président américain Bill Clinton prête et disposé. Grandement pour leurs propres raisons de partisan entièrement à court terme, avec les Républicains NON DÉTESTANTS pathologiques respirant en bas leurs cous, les Clintonites étaient pas prêts pour avoir n'importe quoi du tout pour faire avec l'envoyant d'une nouvelle mission de l'ONU d'un pays africain très petit que, comme est invariablement dit, presque aucun américain ne pourrait même trouver sur une carte. Parmi le P5, la France était le seul pays sincèrement concerné du Rwanda pour ses propres raisons perverses de solidarité francophone et il cherchait furtivement une façon d'intervenir de la part du gouvernement genocidaire extrémiste Hutu. Il a été quitté à l'Ambassadeur américain à l'ONU, Madeleine Albright, mener un mouvement vigoureux dans le Conseil de sécurité à littéralement décimer la force 2500 étrange d'UNAMIR. La Grande-Bretagne, pour les raisons que l'historien-journaliste britannique Linda Melvern essaie toujours de défaire, s'est effondrée solidement derrière les américains. La Russie et la Chine étaient grandement indifférents, une situation qui changerait de façon significative en cas de Darfur. À la fin de la deuxième semaine du génocide, avec environ 100,000 ou plus Tutsi et presque tous Hutu modéré proéminent déjà mort et le génocide gagnant la vitesse quotidienne, le Conseil de sécurité a voté pour réduire la mission UNAMIR de 250 hommes. Forcez le Commandant charmeur Dallaire, furieux et malade dans le fond, a désobéi à cette instruction explicite et a réussi à retenir 400 hommes pour la durée du génocide.

Même maintenant, il est impossible de récapituler ces événements sans estimer qu'ils ne peuvent pas peut-être être vrais. Mais comme pratiquement toutes les autorités sur le sujet sont d'accord et comme la réaction du Conseil de sécurité à Darfur il y a une décade plus tard rend entièrement plausible, ils étaient seulement trop vrais et leur leçon était claire. Là a semblé à peine n'importe quelles profondeurs auxquelles la "communauté internationale" ne coulerait pas s'il les a jugés nécessaires pour ses propres intérêts nationaux, même si cet intérêt n'était rien plus, ni moins que, dans le cas de la Belgique, en recouvrant un abandon lâche des gens au risque ultime, ou pour les Etats-Unis, en gagnant une élection imminente. La convenance politique était tout et le besoin humain a semblé complètement hors de propos.

Pourtant, deux autres leçons de la réaction internationale, en faisant de la peine comme ils étaient à l'époque ont semblé offrir un certain espoir de l'intervention dans les crises futures. D'abord étaient les mensonges dits tant par le Président américain Bill Clinton que par le Secrétaire général de l'ONU Kofi Annan dans le fait de s'excuser plus tard de leur inaction pendant les 100 jours. Tous les deux ont réclamé qu'ils étaient pas assez conscients de la situation à l'époque. Ces revendications, de la part des deux hommes, ont été répudiées au-delà d'une ombre d'un doute. Ils savaient tout, ou au moins tout qu'ils ont voulu savoir. Quand même, leur même manque de franchise a permis l'inférence que la fois suivante "un autre Rwanda" a surgi, s'il pourrait atteindre un suffisamment haut profil public, le Conseil de sécurité aurait perdu l'excuse d'ignorance et a peu d'alternative, mais intervenir. Cette vérité apparente a au départ donné le coeur au mouvement pour intervenir dans Darfur.

Deuxièmement, comme déjà noté, presque personne dans une position officielle à ce temps n'a accepté de caractériser le Rwanda comme un génocide et, mené de nouveau par l'administration de Clinton, a vraiment refusé qu'un génocide progressait en fait . Ce refus d'affirmer l'évident a été de nouveau attaché directement aux peurs électorales du Clintonites. Les avocats gouvernementaux étudiant la Convention de Génocide 1948 ont l'air d'avoir décidé que le fait d'accepter l'étiquette de génocide déclencherait une obligation importante sur l'administration pour intervenir activement. Cette telle interprétation était extrêmement contestable n'est ni ici, ni là. Il était tout à fait possible de soutenir qu'une pure résolution de Conseil de sécurité a satisfait les termes de l'UNCG. Mais les conseillers de Clinton ont voulu ne pas adopter cette lecture. Leur jugement a puissamment affecté la position publique de Clinton.

La télévision a capturé un moment de vrai self-debasement quand un porte-parole de Département américain d'État, certaine Christine Shelly, a essayé d'expliquer aux correspondants que le Rwanda était la scène "d'actes de génocide", mais pas du génocide. Quand poussé pour indiquer combien "les actes de génocide" constituent un génocide complet, Mme Shelly, évidemment humiliée au-delà des mots, a expliqué qu'elle n'a pas été autorisée à s'occuper de cette question. (À son dépit éternel, plusieurs documentaires sur le génocide incluent la longueur en pieds de sa performance désastreuse, unforgivingly le fait de l'immortaliser pour toujours.) la différence entre ce moment pitoyable et réactions américaines ultérieures à Darfur sous le Président Bush pourrait à peine avoir plus lancé un regard furieux.
Et effectivement, la position de Clinton qu'il n'y avait aucun génocide complet au Rwanda innocemment a fourni la faible lueur d'espoir d'un acte d'opportunisme politique sans précédent. Si le Rwanda était "pas tout à fait" un génocide et donc l'intervention n'était pas obligatoire, il a sûrement suivi logiquement que si un génocide a été déclaré dans l'avenir, il ne signifierait pas que l'intervention était obligatoire, inéluctable ? Cette logique, combinée avec la perspective que si un désastre a été assez bien annoncé, le monde aurait peu de choix, mais emménager, a offert un peu d'espoir réel que le "Rwanda suivant" ne serait pas trahi et abandonné comme l'original que le Rwanda avait été.

Le Rwanda suivant

Alors est venu Darfur. Moins d'une décade après que le Pouvoir de Hutu a été vaincu, le monde avait trouvé son "Rwanda suivant". C'est hors de propos à mon argument que les autorités de génocide sérieuses sont en désaccord sur si le conflit est un génocide ou non. Tous conviennent qu'il avait beaucoup de dimensions d'un génocide, que c'est une catastrophe épouvantable et que l'intervention robuste est demandée. Comme nous savons, aucune telle intervention ne s'est produite et comme c'est écrit au début de 2006, la situation semble s'être détériorée considérablement et être devenue encore plus complexe - la conséquence presque inévitable de la réponse maigre du monde jusqu'au présent. Du point de vue des espoirs levés par deux des leçons optimistes du Rwanda, la réponse de la "communauté internationale" à la crise dans Darfur peut seulement être considérée un revers géant, tragique. Il n'est pas trop de dire que Darfur montre que seulement la première leçon désespérée - le cynisme insondable et l'intérêt personnel des pouvoirs importants - - restent valides, pendant que les espoirs ont été grandement détruits.

Enfin, avant le milieu de 2004, au plus tard, chacun qui compte savait qu'un désastre artificiel politique et humanitaire écrasant était arrivé au Soudan occidental. Le 7 avril, quand il devrait correctement avoir été dans Kigali pour la commémoration du dixième anniversaire du génocide Rwandan, Kofi Annan était plutôt à Genève dévoilant un nouveau plan de cinq points pour la prévention de génocide et en annonçant que le monde ne doit pas autoriser à Darfur à devenir "un autre Rwanda". Chacun qui compte bientôt a visité Khartoum pour supplier avec le Gouvernement du Soudan qui orchestrait la crise, ou a passé aux personnes déplacées ou à un camp de réfugiés dans Darfur ou à travers la frontière au Tchad. Quand Annan et Colin Powell font un arrêt quelque part, vous savez que c'est déjà une histoire importante. Il peut ne pas avoir rivalisé avec l'essai de Michael Jackson, mais même dans les mass-média principaux, les histoires de Darfur, les caractéristiques et les morceaux d'opinion étaient remarquablement communs pour une crise si lointaine et complexe.

La crise dans Darfur, autrement dit, était d'assez grandes nouvelles. Cela n'a pas ressemblé au Rwanda. Clinton et Annan savaient tous du Rwanda, mais la couverture médiatique depuis beaucoup de semaines était tant minimale que dénaturé ("la sauvagerie de tribu") donc le public est resté grandement non informé. Pourtant malgré le profil de Darfur, le Conseil de sécurité a été efficacement paralysé par les intérêts opposés du P5 jetant veto. Cette fois la Chine, assoiffée pour le pétrole du Soudan et la Russie, inquiète de vendre les bras à un gouvernement génocide, des rôles de becquet aussi joués. Le Conseil a passé une série de résolutions de houppette chaque menace des tueurs à Khartoum que s'ils n'ont pas freiné leurs forces de Janjaweed, ils seraient avec vigueur affrontés avec - encore une autre résolution. Peut-être pas puisqu'un représentant du gouvernement genocidaire du Rwanda a retenu sa position sur le Conseil de sécurité par le génocide de 1994 entier a le Conseil de sécurité apparu pour être plus d'une plaisanterie que sur Darfur.

Le rôle des États-Unis

Pourtant il y avait une autre raison pour l'espoir. Poussé par une coalition improbable de groupes de pression domestiques, le Congrès américain et l'Exécutif ont publiquement déclaré que Darfur a constitué un vrai génocide conformément à la Convention 1948. Un pas si radical et dramatique était sans précédent dans l'histoire américaine. Les deux chambres de Congrès à la hâte et ont unanimement passé leurs propres résolutions déclarant Darfur être un génocide avec à peine une explication, sans parler de la discussion et le Président Bush et le Secrétaire d'Etat Colin Powell que chacun a finalement suivi avec leurs propres déclarations concordantes. À la communauté de prévention de génocide, cela a semblé le moment dont ils rêvaient si longtemps et avaient planifié pour. Quel serait le point de faire cette déclaration à moins que l'action significative ne soit planifiée ? C'était vrai que le gouvernement de Bush et d'autres, étaient modestement généreux dans l'établissement de l'aide humanitaire au déplacé et les réfugiés aussi bien que le financement pour la Mission d'Union Africaine de Darfur. Mais maintenant, sûrement, avec ces déclarations, était le moment longtemps attendu d'escalade qualitative. Maintenant nous verrions que la sorte d'intervention énergique a nié le Rwanda et c'était essentiel si le travestissement au Soudan devait être mis fin.
En fait, tout ce qui a été nécessaire devait payer font attention à la deuxième partie de la déclaration de Colin Powell avant le Sénat américain le Comité de Relations Étranger. Oui, les Etats-Unis avaient décidé, sur le fait de regarder l'évidence qu'il avait spécialement commandée - l'opposé exact du Rwanda - qu'un génocide survenait avant les yeux du monde. Powell avait sans doute que le monde attendu ensuite et a dit si explicitement : "M. le Président, certains semblent avoir attendu cette détermination de génocide de prendre des mesures.

En fait, pourtant, aucune nouvelle action n'est déterminée par cette détermination. Nous avons fait tout que nous pouvons pour recevoir le gouvernement soudanais pour agir de manière responsable. Permettez-nous si pas d'être préoccupés de cette désignation de génocide. Ces gens sont dans le besoin désespéré et nous devons les aider. Appelez-le une guerre civile. Appelez-le le nettoyage ethnique. Appelez-le le génocide. N'appelez-le 'aucun des susdits'. La réalité est le même : il y a les gens dans Darfur qui ont désespérément besoin de notre aide." (Le Département américain d'État, "la Crise Dans Darfur," Les remarques écrites avant le Sénat FRC, Washington, courant continu, le 9 septembre 2004).

Comment c'était possible ? N'avait la déclaration historique de génocide été rien d'autre qu'un truc politique opportuniste par l'administration de Bush pour apaiser certains groupes de pression domestiques ? Pourrait même Bush neocons être si cynique pour jouer la politique avec le génocide ? Sinon, comment ce développement entièrement non attendu pourrait-il être expliqué ? Comment Colin Powell estimé pourrait-il participer à cet exercice destructif qui a fait tant pour dégrader la devise de la Convention de Génocide ?

Au cours des mois purs de la détermination du gouvernement américain de génocide dans Darfur, une nouvelle traîtrise d'administration de Bush de Darfur a été exposée. D'abord est venu la révélation que la CIA avait envoyé un avion à Khartoum pour transporter la tête d'intelligence soudanaise, général Salah Abdallah Mince alors, à Washington pour les discussions avec ses pairs américains sur la "guerre contre la terreur". Le Soudan, il apparaît, était devenu "un capital d'intelligence crucial à la CIA." (Suzanne Goldenberg, "le Soudan Exclu émerge comme l'allié américain clé dans la 'guerre sur la terreur'," le Gardien Chaque semaine, le 6-12 mai 2005.) Ne font pas attention à ce que le nom de général Gosh soit largement supposé pour être parmi les 51 principaux fonctionnaires soudanais appelés par la Commission d'enquête internationale NON NOMMÉE sur Darfur. La "guerre sur le terrorisme" coupe évidemment le génocide. Plus tard nous avons appris juste comment près ce lien était vraiment . En octobre de 2005, le correspondant de Gardien Jonathan Steele a signalé la chose suivante :

" Question : Quand les fonctionnaires d'administration de Bush se blottissent-ils aux chefs d'états que les Etats-Unis décrivent comme les sponsors de terrorisme international ? Réponse : Quand ils sont à Khartoum. Je sais parce que je l'ai vu l'autre jour. Nous assistions au dîner final d'une conférence de 2 jours de fonctionnaires de contre-terrorisme africains, à qui les Etats-Unis et le Royaume-Uni ont été invités comme les observateurs. Les fantômes occidentaux étaient moins qu'heureux d'avoir la presse occidentale en main, d'autant plus que leurs noms ont été appelés. Mais la perte d'anonymat était un petit prix pour la coopération excellente les deux agences croient que le Soudan donne pour garder des étiquettes sur Somali, les fondamentalistes arabes saoudiens et autres qui traversent son territoire. [Le dîner] était dans le jardin du siège social du service des renseignements du Soudan, pas loin du Nil. En haut marché un agent de CIA aîné. Dans la vue complète de la compagnie rassemblée, il a donné à général Salah Abdallah Mince alors, le chef d'intelligence du Soudan, une prise de l'ours. Le général a répondu par la livraison d'un sac de bon, emballé dans le livre blanc luisant. Ensuite en haut était le fonctionnaire M16 [britannique], avec la même routine trop démonstrative. "(Jonathan Steele, "n'était pas Darfur le génocide et le Soudan n'est pas un terroriste," le Gardien, le 7 octobre 2005.)

Il y a toujours des activistes de Darfur qui croient que malgré les rapports travaillant proches entre l'administration de Bush et avec précision on peut toujours compter sur ces chefs soudanais contre qui la Cour d'assises internationale a l'intention de délivrer des mandats, les Etats-Unis comme un allié dans le fait de pressuriser Khartoum pour mettre fin à sa guerre contre le Pelage et d'autres Africains. Je regrette que je ne puisse pas être d'accord. Le gouvernement de Khartoum est aussi circonspect que c'est perfide et utilise avec insouciance sa force d'appui pour continuer à échapper au meurtre dans Darfur. Il a maintenant des atouts avec les américains, le Chinois et les Russes. Ceux de nous qui préconisons l'intervention sur les terres sévèrement humanitaires n'ont aucune influence comparable du tout. Le résultat est pratiquement prédestiné : la mort et le viol et subissant dans le Soudan occidental continueront.

Y a-il maintenant des leçons de Darfur, ayant vu que la seule leçon du Rwanda qui s'est avéré pertinent était la la plus désespérée ? Il démoralise presque aussi même pour demander. Mais car ceux-là ont engagé à la prévention de génocide ou aux interventions sur les terres sévèrement humanitaires, on doit de nouveau poser des questions résistantes, de nouvelles directions créatrices et des mécanismes cherchés. L'alternative est trop affreuse pour contempler.

* Gerald Caplan a un doctorat dans l'histoire africaine de l'École d'Études Orientales et africaines, l'Université de Londres. Il est l'auteur du Rwanda : le Génocide Évitable, le rapport du Comité international de Personnalités Éminentes nommées par l'Organisation d'Africain Unity pour enquêter sur le génocide Rwandan; le fondateur "de pour Se souvenir du Rwanda"; et le coéditeur avec Eric Markusen d'une édition spéciale du Journal de Recherche de Génocide consacrée au 10ème anniversaire du génocide Rwandan. Il enseigne un cours sur le génocide à Rwandans au Rwanda.

With the global music extravaganza that is Live 8 just around the corner, Gerald Caplan is nervous about the crocodile tears shed for Africa by leaders like Tony Blair. Caplan writes that the job of Bono, Bob Geldof and other Live 8 organizers is to let their fans know that Africans need no more missionaries or do-gooders. “Instead, Africans have a right to justice and equity to make up for the incalculable harm that we in the rich world have inflicted on them for such a long, long time,” writes Caplan.

Everybody must be aware by now of the Bob Geldof Live 8 spectacular coming at us next week. The media has been abuzz with burning questions about where the concert will be held and who'll be performing, with a sentence occasionally thrown in about saving poor old Africa or ending poverty. This is a serious problem.

Getting it wrong about Africa is a venerable tradition in the rich world, and music has played its role. Remember the great famine concerts of 20 years ago and the giant hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?" It's just been re-recorded, with its inane lyrics of Africa as a land "underneath a burning sun…where nothing ever grows" and "no rain nor river flows". Get it? Natural causes---bad luck—are at the root of Africa's problems.

Television does its share. Who among us haven't seen inspiring stories about young Canadians who decide to raise pennies for a well or school in Africa? These efforts are invariably motivated by the best of intentions. But I'm concerned with their unintended message. I fear they reinforce wrong-headed stereotypes of both Africa and us. To my eye, they show Africans as helpless, dependent, passive victims, and we westerners as decent, selfless, compassionate, resourceful missionaries.

Now Paul Wolfowitz's has added his explanation for Africa's plight. Moving swiftly from being a maven about Iraq to becoming an authority on Africa's 53 countries, the new head of the World Bank has just completed a whirlwind learning tour of the continent—6 days, 4 countries. The problem in Africa, he announced at the end, is simple: "corruption". Right. If only Africa's leaders were more like our own.

These views reflect a common theme: they leave the rich world blameless for Africa's multitude of problems. I greatly fear that Live 8 is inadvertently strengthening the notion that we in the rich world must be missionaries to save Africans from themselves. The truth is already being lost-- the deep, comprehensive responsibility of western nations and western financial institutions for so much of Africa's continuing underdevelopment and poverty. The real reason the rich world should be racing to deal with African poverty is the central role we have played in causing and perpetuating it. Has anyone told Paul Wolfowitz that vastly more money pours out of Africa each year back to rich countries than flows in? That's the key to Africa's development crisis, and it's almost entirely unrecognized.

The responsibility of the rich world takes many forms. It includes the indispensable support given over the decades to countless African tyrants and to white racists. It includes the demonstrably retrograde free market policies imposed on virtually every Africa government by ideological extremists at the World Bank and International monetary Fund (also known by African pediatricians as the Infant Mortality Fund) and backed by almost all western governments, including Canada. Across west Africa, it's cheaper to buy a subsidized frozen chicken imported from Holland that to buy one from a local producer. Foreign aid is always tied to buying goods and services in the rich country or to sending consultants to Africa to make more in a day than the vast majority of Africans do in a year. Rich countries drain off a huge percentage of the professionals—doctors and nurses, especially—who are trained in African universities. Western corporations plunder Africa's natural resources, pay starvation wages and almost no local taxes, bribe anyone in charge—corruption!--pollute hideously, and leave conflict and human rights abuses in their wake. Western donors demand that user fees be imposed on health services and tuition fees on schooling. They demand that public services be slashed so that health and school systems deteriorate. The US government and fundamentalist western religious groups introduce unrealistic and irrelevant moral dogmas to combat AIDS and undermine evidence-based methods of prevention

Anyone who doesn't distrust the Group of 8 leaders who'll be meeting next month hasn't been paying attention. They're the ones responsible for the economic apartheid that characterizes rich-poor country relations today. Every one of them has failed to live up to repeated pledges about aid, debt relief and agricultural subsidies, solemnly made and blithely ignored. The recent ballyhoo about debt relief for 14 African countries was wildly overblown; it was no more than a modest first step. The more leaders like Tony Blair and Paul Martin shed crocodile tears talk about their moral crusade for Africa, the more liberal imperialist rhetoric they spin, the more nervous we should be. The job of Bono and Bob Geldof and other Live 8 organizers is to let their fans know that Africans need no more missionaries or do-gooders. Instead, Africans have a right to justice and equity to make up for the incalculable harm that we in the rich world have inflicted on them for such a long, long time.

* Gerald Caplan works with various UN agencies on African development issues.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In this keynote address to the Toronto Armenian Community on the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Gerald Caplan explores the ‘solidarity of sorrow’ between the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides. What these three genocides have in common transcend their differences and all people who believe in justice should work together for genocide prevention, he writes.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots in the spring rain.

T. S. Eliot wrote these haunting, unforgettable words in his epic poem The Waste Land. This was 7 years before the Armenian genocide, which we commemorate on April 24 and which we have no evidence Eliot was touched by. It was 21 years before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the 2nd World War, during the black heart of the Holocaust, which we commemorate on April 19 and which Eliot could hardly have conceived only 2 decades later. And it was 72 years before the genocide in Rwanda, the great genocide of the late 20th century, occurring almost exactly half a century after the world, emerging from the nightmare of Hitler, vowed Never Again. April, when the lilacs bloom again.

The 20th century has gone down in historical infamy as the Century of Genocide. I'm sorry I don't know whether the 1904 genocide by the German army of the Herero people of south-west Africa (now Namibia), the first genocide of the last century, also took place in April. But we do know that the near-genocide of the Fur people of western Sudan has now entered its 3rd April with little respite and no adequate international intervention. We also know from Rwanda and Darfur that Never Again has been trivialized as so much rhetorical bombast by public figures on public occasions, sound and fury signifying little. We now know that unless major strategic or economic interests are at play, if nothing is at stake beyond mere human life, on however massive a scale, then the accurate description of the state of our times is Again and Again and Again.

What we also know, I'm afraid—and this is an equally dismaying observation---is that for a very large number of those descended from victims and survivors of the genocides of our time, the precise concept is in any event NOT Never Again. It's that never again will OUR people be the victims of such a calamity.

I am honored and humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address on this historic occasion. But I also feel outraged and almost morally defeated—as you all must surely be--- that the central message of this 90th anniversary remains the relentless effort to persuade our own government in Ottawa, the Government of the United States, and—I single it out for reasons that I'll try to make clear---the government of Israel, to perform a simple act of justice. We must continue to insist that each of them officially recognizes that in 1915, a classic genocide, wholly consistent with the definition set down 35 years later in the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, was deliberately inflicted upon the Armenian people living in Turkey by the Turkish government and army and their proxies.

It happens to be among the several terrible ironies of this humiliating situation that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who coined the word genocide and almost single-handedly pressured the United Nations into adopting the Convention in 1948, cited the annihilation of the Armenians as a seminal example of genocide.

I have asked myself why I was selected for this role today. I assume my good friend Aris Babikian, well-known to you all as a community representative, played a key role in this decision. I'm very sorry family matters have prevented Aris from being here today. For those who may not know, I want to tell you that in my view, Aris Babikian is the best single ambassador that the Canadian Armenian community has. NOT because he never stops lobbying anyone with the slightest power and influence about the injustice of non-recognition, although that is true. But because he is THIS community's link to OTHER communities who have shared comparable tragedies. In fact, I regret to say frankly, in my experience Aris is one of only few Armenian Canadians who have shown a genuine interest and who has reached out to such other communities.

And that's why I believe I'm here. Because like Aris, I believe in the solidarity of sorrow and the solidarity of victims.

My own special focus is Rwanda. For various reasons, I came to write a long report, a history, in effect, of the Rwanda genocide. Called "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," it documents the organized slaughter in 1994 of perhaps 800,000, perhaps a million - no one yet knows for sure - Rwandan Tutsi and thousands of pro-democracy Rwanda Hutu, and the complicity in or indifference to this genocide by members of the international community. When the report was published, I found myself unable simply to walk away and begin new and unrelated pursuits. I feared that the memory of the genocide, only 6 years after the tragedy, had already almost vanished, assuming any but a bare minority ever knew the truth about it in the first place beyond a few horrific TV images.

Working from my home, I founded an international voluntary movement called Remembering Rwanda, dedicated to commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the genocide. (The 11th anniversary, on April 7, passed with barely a murmur; I doubt many outside Rwanda knew of it at all.) From the start, I particularly sought out the support and cooperation of Jewish and Armenian organizations.

I had two reasons. I instinctively believed that the solidarity of victims would be obvious to these two communities above all, so that the simple fact of shared victimhood would lead their survivors and descendants to rush to support each other. And I believed (as someone who has always been involved in political action for social change) that for good practical reasons of increased influence, the more of us that we could unite in a common cause, the better for us all.

Despite my long years in the political trenches, I seem to have been stunningly naïve. Of course we found some support. A number of prominent Jews in North America, Europe and Israel lent us their names. A few prominent Armenians did the same. Aris managed to get the agreement of several international Armenian organizations to use their names as well, but I believe that I only ever spoke to a couple of their members in total. During last year's three-day commemoration in Toronto for the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, Aris alone showed up on behalf of the Armenian community. I can tell you how gratified the Rwandans were by his presence. In the dozens of other cities throughout North America and western Europe where commemorations took place, sometimes a few known Armenians were involved, sometimes none at all. Why should this be? I asked a number of people. The bottom line always seemed to be a preoccupation with the Armenian genocide to the exclusion of any other.

This is of course understandable. We naturally all feel most strongly the loss of our own family and kin. But beyond that, the Armenian people, like the Rwandans in certain ways, still must cope with the special burden of official denial. They are assaulted by the harsh reality that the Turkish government to this day refuses to acknowledge the crime that was committed and lobbies incessantly against recognition of the genocide by other governments. I know that this insult continues to drive the Armenian community.

Nevertheless, I must tell you frankly that I found the general disinterest of Armenians in the Rwandan genocide to be not only morally disappointing but from your own point of view, politically short-sighted.

As for the Jewish communities of the western world and the government of Israel, with notable honorable exceptions they failed to respond in a positive manner. I believe that most of the western Jewish and Israeli establishments were more or less indifferent to the Rwandan genocide.

In regard to the Armenian genocide, I must report that these same elements were in the vanguard of denial.

I fully understand that these are very sensitive and delicate matters, and it's much easier not to raise them at all. But that would be running away from uncomfortable truths carrying important lessons. I want instead to try to talk about them as carefully as possible. I'm sure the fact that I'm Jewish- wholly non-religious, even anti-religious, but yet Jewish to my core - complicates the issue considerably. These are thoughts I have tried to work out for several years. Today seems to be an appropriate forum for articulating them.

On the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, are inscribed one of Hitler's more intriguing statements. In 1939, just before he launched his aggression against Poland, triggering the Second World War, Hitler explained that he was dispatching special death squads to Poland that would deliberately slaughter large numbers of Polish men, women and children. But he wasn't remotely concerned about the reaction. "Who, after all," he asked, "speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" In other words, he was saying, with sufficient shamelessness, you could literally get away with murder, even murder of the ultimate kind. For the past eight decades, a series of Turkish governments and their supporters have largely confirmed Hitler's cynical insight, as they have denied the very existence of the genocide and attempted to undermine all attempts to have it recognized.

As it happens, in recent years their bullying and intimidation tactics have increasingly failed, as a growing number of countries have officially recognized the genocide. But to our shame, Canada has not, the United States has not, and Israel has not.

One year ago, the House of Commons in Ottawa voted to recognize the genocide by a large margin, 153 votes to 68. But the entire cabinet voted against the resolution, citing the need to maintain good relations with Turkey. So the bizarre situation in our own country is that the Canadian House of Commons recognizes the genocide of the Armenians, but the government of Canada officially does not.

In the United States, although George Bush promised recognition in his first presidential campaign, he soon enough reneged in the face of joint pressure from both Turkish officials and significant Jewish-American organizations, such as the highly influential American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. This is not often widely discussed publicly. But it's perfectly familiar in American political circles since Congress too has been convinced by this same tenacious lobby to reject resolutions calling for recognition. This lobbying effort was hardly unknown, having been documented last year by the Israeli daily Haaretz among other sources.

I should also stress that on the other hand, and as one would have hoped and expected, prominent among those publicly calling for American government recognition of the genocide were a significant number of Jewish Americans. They included Holocaust scholars, rabbis and community leaders, all of whom had concluded from the evidence that there was absolutely no question that a classic genocide had been inflicted on Turkey's Armenians.

The cooperation between Turkish officials and these Jewish American organizations naturally reflects Israel's own position on the question. That position is an adamant refusal to acknowledge the 1915 genocide, regardless of the evidence. In fact so strongly has this policy been maintained by a series of Israeli governments that it is, unfortunately, fair to say that rather than indifference, rather than the passivity of the bystander, Israelis, with a few notably courageous exceptions, have taken active measures to undermine attempts to safeguard the memory of the Armenian genocide. One of these, I'm afraid, has been to deny that a genocide ever occurred. Here we have the most appalling irony of them all: that those who consider that denial of the Holocaust is tantamount almost to a 2nd Holocaust, have now become deniers of the genocide of the Armenians.

The motives of this almost Orwellian stance are, however, clear enough. There are two.

The first, and the better-known, is based on Israel's determination to maintain a strategic alliance between itself and Turkey in the Middle East. Israel's vital interests are deemed to be at stake here, not to say it's very survival. This is an understandable and easily defended position. But it's a position that places realpolitik and national strategic interests ahead of ethics, ahead of the solidarity of genocide victims, and ahead of Israel's self-declared claim to be a different kind of nation, indeed a "light unto the nations". This is a position that says that even the common fate of genocide cannot take priority over Israel's perceived self-interest.

But this leads to the 2nd reason for Israel's refusal to recognize the genocide, one that I find far more difficult to understand or to share. It is precisely the refusal to accept that the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, or the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, or the Holocaust and any other human catastrophe, can be equated in any way.

As the Jerusalem Post editorialized a decade ago: "There is nothing in history like the Holocaust. It was not even JUST a genocide." The Holocaust must be seen as transcendent, as being in a separate category, from all other presumably "ordinary" genocides like the Armenians'.

I want to say again that these are remarkably sensitive issues, frankly uncomfortable and difficult to discuss. They are felt passionately and unforgivingly by many. For many Jews, both in Israel and the western world, recognizing other genocides somehow diminishes the singularity, the uniqueness, of what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe, and on this uniqueness they are uncompromising. Nothing, they declare, can compare to the Holocaust. It is incomparable. It is unprecedented. It is unique. It is even, in the actual words of two scholars determined to end any possibility of further debate, "uniquely unique".

The significance of this debate has been described by one Israeli scholar this way: "From Auschwitz came two people: a minority that insists it will never happen again, and a majority that insists it will never happen to US again."

This is a helpful way to frame the debate. It points out that the lesson of the Holocaust, or at least the implication, can be seen as either particularistic or universalistic, as either a unique episode in human history applicable only to the Jewish people or a grotesque reflection of the potential capacity of human nature for depravity. Of course every event in history is unique and unprecedented in certain ways, and beyond question some aspects of the Holocaust are literally unique, that is to say, nothing else like them had ever happened before or indeed since. But the same, alas, can be said of aspects of both the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.

I believe that what the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides have in common transcend their differences.

For what all three have in common is that in each case, a cabal of conspirators set out explicitly and deliberately to exterminate all the members of the target group for the simple reason of WHO they were, not what they did. What all have in common is a demonstration that whether Turks in the circumstances prevailing in 1915, or Germans in the context of Nazi Germany and World War 2, or Rwandan Hutu in the ambience of the 100 days after April 7, 1994 - in each of these circumstances, ordinary Turks and ordinary Germans and ordinary Rwandans perpetrated crimes that no one would have thought them - or any other human being - capable of. I believe that in advance, few of them would have believed themselves capable of such a descent into barbarism.

For that reason, I consider that I too am capable - under unfathomable but feasible circumstances - of perpetrating similar crimes. For that reason, I see in the Holocaust a universal and not a particular lesson.

I see that any people anywhere may suddenly become the victims of unspeakable atrocities.

I see the solidarity of sorrow, not the competition of victims.

I see that all racism, all bigotry, all hatred, all anti-democratic behaviour must be opposed without compromise.

I see the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed and the victimized wherever in the world they may be.

Let me conclude with a quote from an article written in 1918 by a man named Shmuel Tolkowsky. Tolkowsky mattered. He was secretary to Chaim Weizmann, then the leader of the world Zionist movement and later the 1st president of the State of Israel. The article, written only three years after the genocide of the Armenians, was called "The Armenian Question from the Zionist Point of View". It is reproduced in a recent book given to me by Aris Babikian called The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, written by an Israeli, Yair Auron.

"We Zionists look upon the fate of the Armenian people with a deep and sincere sympathy," Tolkowsky wrote. "We do so as men [he meant humans], as Jews, and as Zionists. As men our motto is…'I am a human being. Whatever affects another human being affects me.' As Jews, our exile from our ancestral home and our centuries of suffering in all parts of the globe have made us, I would fain to say, specialists in martyrdom; our humanitarian feelings have been refined to an incomparable degree, so much so that the sufferings of other people - even alien to us in blood and remote from us in distance - cannot but strike the deeper chords of our soul and weave between us and our fellow sufferers that deep bond of sympathy which one might call the solidarity of sorrow. And among all those who suffer around us, is there a people whose record of martyrdom is more akin to ours than that of the Armenians?"

Today I would add: "Or that of the Rwandans?"

So I hope that Armenians, Rwandans and Jews, and all women and men who believe in justice and a better, more equitable world, will work together for genocide prevention, will work together to end the terrible calamity in Darfur, and will work together to ensure that when we meet again 10 years from now, we will commemorate together the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, mildly comforted that, at long last, the entire world will finally have come to acknowledge the terrible, indisputable reality of your history.

* Please send comments to

This is the second part of Gerry Caplan's "The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again" published in Pambazuka News 177 last week.

The Genocide Specialists From the first, I had thought my report should put the Rwandan genocide into some historical context, and I began reading in the field of genocide generally. Before long, I had come face to face with the burgeoning world of genocide studies. This subculture, I soon discovered, is quite separate from that of high-profile Holocaust studies. While some specialists in "other" genocides are also students of the Holocaust, for a long time only a handful of Holocaust specialists were prepared to accept experts in comparative genocides as their kin. According to New York City College Professor Henry Huttenbach, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, most Holocaust specialists still demand that the genocide of the Jews be treated as qualitatively different from - really a greater catastrophe than - the genocide of others. And "any whiff of comparison was automatically condemned as a form of denial, revisionism, trivialization, etc." This is an enormously emotional and divisive issue, but the evidence surely corroborates Huttenbach's assertion. In his intellectually thrilling and morally courageous study, The Holocaust in American Life, University of Chicago historian Peter Novick introduces the concept of "the Olympics of victimization," a fierce competition for primacy among the world's victims that the Jews are determined to win. Largely, they have succeeded. Even a good number, though not all, of my newly discovered genocide studies family share the view that the Holocaust - always with a capital "H" - is at the farthest point of the genocide continuum.

In 1999, when I began working on Rwanda, the world of non-Holocaust genocide studies was just beginning to flourish. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn's The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies in 1990 was way ahead of the curve. It was Rwanda and Srebrenica that really set things off. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) had been organized in 1994. In 1999, Huttenbach founded the Journal of Genocide Studies, the first of its kind not exclusively dedicated to the Holocaust. The same year, a two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide appeared. In 2002, a thick and engrossing collection of essays appeared called Pioneers of Genocide Studies - imagine: pioneers already! - and Samantha Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her exceptional study A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Imagine: humanity had inflicted on itself an entire era of genocide, and we were living through it.

The field was taking off. In June, 2003, I was among two hundred people attending the IAGS conference in Galway, Ireland. There were forty-four intriguing panels to choose from, so many I couldn't even attend all the Rwanda sessions let alone those on Burundi, Srebrenica, Armenia, the Third World and the Holocaust, the Herero of southwestern Africa, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Korea, Bangladesh, Assyria, the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, Cambodia, genocide prevention, genocide denial, comparative genocide, genocide art, genocide and children, survivors, truth commissions, the problem of reconciliation, the problem of reparations, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and even more.

Size is relative, of course. This small, tight world of genocide mavens is some-thing of a movable feast really: I keep meeting them at other conferences, in London, northern England, Stockholm, Lund, Washington, Toronto, and Rwanda itself. Their hero is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the word "genocide" and was the driving force behind the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. They know by rote the convention's key clauses and even its wildly optimistic title: "The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." And they know the politics. After long, acrimonious negotiations that included early intimations of Cold War hostilities, the General Assembly agreed soon after World War II that genocide would be defined as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

From these few words spill a host of complications. How do you prove intent? Exactly how many victims are necessary to constitute a "part"? What about "politicide," the word invented to describe attempts to eliminate political opponents, the stock-in-trade of both governments proudly promising to introduce "socialism" - Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia - and those defending the "free world" against "socialism" - U.S.-backed military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, the apartheid government in South Africa. What's the difference between mass murder, pogroms, or large-scale massacres and genocide, and why does it matter? And - the central conundrum - how can we know whether a conflict will escalate into a genocide until it actually does?

Then there are the bedeviling practical issues. What are the consequences of a determination that genocide is being carried out? Countries that ratify the convention "undertake to prevent and to punish" genocide perpetrators, and are entitled to call on the UN "to take such action under the Charter of the UN as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide." That's all. There's no call for direct military intervention. So, de-spite the apparent angst by the Clinton administration in 1994 that if it recognized Rwanda as a genocide it would be obliged to dispatch U.S. troops, many authorities agree that a strongly worded resolution at the Security Council would fulfill the obligations of the convention - even if the genocide continued.

These issues have been debated at interminable length by the cognoscenti, who mostly agree about the flaws of the 1948 convention and disagree about attempts to amend it. As a result, like it or not, it will remain unamended, unsatisfactory as it clearly is, while the new International Criminal Court and the rest of us make do as best we can. And we will continue to disagree on what is and what is not a genocide. Some well-regarded scholars argue there have been as many as fifty such calamities since the world vowed "Never Again" after Hitler's defeat in 1945. Others say that only four really meet the criteria set out in the UN Convention: the extermination of the Hereros, the Armenians, the Jews, and the Tutsi. It's more than a merely pedantic academic debate. But it will never be resolved. Genocide specialists seem to hold, simultaneously, two quite separate big ideas: that under certain circumstances all humans are capable of perpetrating unspeakable crimes against humanity; and that the only sound motive for being a "genocide freak" - as one of them wryly calls the group - is to figure out how to prevent its recurrence. Intuitively, the two may seem to be in conflict. After all, the record indisputably shows that humans have used violent means to resolve disputes ever since our species first evolved. How can we prevent genocide - or violence between humans of any kind - since humans are clearly hardwired to resort to force under any number of circumstances? To activists, however, the resolution of this dialectic is obvious: we must learn to predict the onslaught of genocide and have the capacity to nip it in the bud.

It came as no surprise to me that so many well-known, highly reputable genocide scholars subscribe to the old insight memorably articulated by Walt Kelly's sweet comic book character, Pogo Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us." You can't study this subject without wondering about yourself. And we all do. Most of the two dozen men and women who are the "pioneers of genocide studies" explicitly believe that they themselves are potentially capable of the most atrocious behaviour imaginable. In the words of scholar and author Eric Markusen, "the vast majority of perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders to genocidal violence are not sadists or psychopaths, but are psychologically normal according to standard means of assessing mental health and illness." Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli and one of the Holocaust scholars, told me that genocidal attitudes now exist among both Palestinians and Israelis. This is not a man to use such language loosely. As for Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of Hutu were actively involved in the genocide. Most of them were ordinary Rwandans. What possible reason is there to believe they were fundamentally different from me? Or you?

But genocide scholars believe - hope? pray? - that our capacity for evil can be constrained. Perhaps the driving passion of genocide scholarship is to learn from the past to prevent recurrences in the future. As the presentations at the Galway conference amply demonstrated, these are scholar/activists who make no pretense to scholarly detachment. It's not that they eschew solid academic research; on the contrary, most take it very seriously and some are very good at it. But many openly pursue their academic work for activist ends. Virtually all of them are committed either to the prevention of future genocides or to having the world offer appropriate recognition to their own special genocide. A good number are committed to both. Indeed, there is now a Genocide Watch and a full-blown International Campaign to End Genocide supported by twenty-four active member organizations.

Why should this be? After all, you won't find all of the innumerable students of war marching with the peace movement, and no one expects them to. They're scholars for the sake of scholarship - or, perhaps, for publication. But I'd confidently say that all experts in the Armenian genocide have as their overriding purpose getting the world to recognize the 1915 genocide inflicted by the Turks. What drives them mad is the continuing success of Ankara in pressuring the governments of Germany, Britain, the U.S., and - in an unnerving triumph of realpolitik over the solidarity of victims - Israel, to refuse to officially recognize the genocide of the Armenians.

The personal is political in genocide studies. Most authorities on the Armenian genocide are Armenians, descendants of the genocide's victims or survivors. Here, of course, is the key to their militancy and activism. Similarly, most of the pioneers of Holocaust and genocide studies, and the founders of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the Journal of Genocide Studies, have been Jewish - survivors, relatives of survivors, or child refugees. Another perceptible group, small but influential, focus on genocide scholarship from a Christian perspective; that is, genocide as the ultimate violation of the laws of God. This, needless to say, is not the bellicose Christianity that so many Americans now seem to embrace.

So Galway wasn't just another academic conference, a talk shop where the arcane and obscure so often reign. This was a coming together of people who had consciously steeped themselves in the most terrible calamities humans have wrought on each other. Many had been touched directly by a genocide. All had a cause, most of them worthy ones. Just about every imaginable horror show of the past century was flagged in those few days.

Yet every single person at that conference was aware that "Never Again" had proved to be one of the greatest broken promises in history; as any genocide maven will aggressively tell you, "Again and Again" is the more accurate phrase. The very reason the genocide prevention movement is thriving is because the phenomenon itself is thriving. Look at the last decade alone. Bosnia and Rwanda. Serbs and Kosovars. Chechnya and East Timor. Nuclear threats, inherently genocidal, between Pakistan and India. Sierra Leone, with its child militias and child amputees. Potential genocide in the Ivory Coast. Burundi on a knife's edge. Rwanda enigmatic and unpredictable. The ongoing calamity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. And the latest test case: the disaster in Darfur in western Sudan.

If crimes against humanity continue - and they do, as I write - it's not because specialists in genocide aren't trying to prevent them. The question is how to do so. Most of these "preventionists" argue for an early warning system that would allow experts to predict when a genocide is likely, so that the world can be informed and take appropriate action. For the last couple of years, some advocated for a "genocide prevention focal point" to be set up permanently at the UN, and as his contribution to the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced something very much like that. The premise is straightforward: through empirical and scientific observation of conflicts, we can isolate the variables and causal mechanisms at work and predict future genocides before they occur. With this information, we can then intervene and prevent the tragedy.

Once again, complications arise. There's no more reason for genocide scholars to agree on everything than for genocide victims to do so. Not everyone agrees on which conflicts in the past have been "real" genocides. Not every-one agrees on the variables and stages that lead to genocide. In practice, it's usually more credible and accurate to speak of large-scale massacres and atrocities than of genocide. The Nazi genocide against the Jews didn't begin until 1941. Until it was actually launched in Rwanda, no one could be sure there'd be a genocide; but there had been anti-Tutsi pogroms galore. Already there's a heated dispute as to whether Darfur constitutes a genocide or "ethnic clean-sing." Surely there's no need to resolve this semantic dispute before intervening?

Two intertwined dilemmas remain. Without meaning to sound pretentious, I'd say that preventionists must address the question of human nature. In spite of endless "Never Again" rhetoric and unprecedented efforts to prevent genocide in the past decade or so, and in the face of the rapid growth of what has been dubbed the "genocide prevention industry," before our very eyes the phenomenon of genocide has continued and even intensified. In this sense, the work of the preventionists is a Sisyphean labour of hope and faith over reason and evidence.

Even more problematic is the premise that if we're able to forecast an imminent genocide, policymakers will then naturally jump in and end the crisis before it escalates. I don't see it: I regard it as the genocide specialists' equivalent of "the truth shall make you free" - one of life's great fallacies. Fore-knowledge of genocide might just as easily have the opposite effect. Given the track record to date, it's at least as plausible to argue that early warnings of potential genocide are most likely to help politicians distance themselves from any obligation to intervene in the conflict. In the words of Samuel Totten, a highly respected genocide scholar, developing potential early warning signals "is easy - and this is a vast understatement - compared to mobilizing the political will of the international community to act when such signals appear on the horizon." Two factors are at work here. Human nature, for politicians, is to avoid entanglements they can't control and which have little political payoff. Beyond that, the interests of the preventionists' world and the powers-that-be seem largely antithetical. Almost all of us oppose the major interventions initiated by the U.S. and Britain, while they in turn are largely indifferent to the interventions we plead for.

As I write, Darfur stands as the test. Despite a flurry of activity, at the moment the world is failing badly, the penalty, as always, being paid by those under siege. Darfur is routinely called "the new Rwanda," but I'm more taken with the differences. The massive attacks by Arab Muslim militias on African Muslim peas-ants and farmers, supported by the terrorist government in Khartoum, began in early 2003. Since then, the usual suspects among humanitarian and human rights agencies, joined by the International Campaign to End Genocide, have been demanding that action be taken. Early in 2004, with the death, rape, and refugee counts mounting, the calls for action intensified. Mainstream media coverage became widespread around April with the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. An unprecedented informal coalition emerged, including the Bush administration. Maybe it's a genocide, almost certainly it's severe ethnic cleansing, and it is without question a world-class atrocity. Everybody now agrees the situation is intolerable. This makes the situation almost more terrible than Rwanda's a decade ago. Despite everything we know, despite all the demands made on the terrorist Sudanese government by the most powerful forces on earth, nothing has changed. Verbal threats are backed by mealy-mouthed resolutions promising serious consideration of future action if the militias aren't suppressed immediately. Meanwhile, the arrival of the rainy season in May blocked sup-plies to the hundreds of thousands of displaced African refugees, and the raids continued. How many more will be added to the fifty thousand dead and the hundreds of thousands of pathetic refugees, while the world attacks with a torrent of words?

The real comparison with 1994, then, is simply inaction in the face of gross provocation. At the end of the day, no Geneva Convention on genocide, whatever its language, and no early warnings, however unmistakable, can substitute for political will among the powers-that-can. The extent of recent coverage of the Darfur tragedy suggests that media and public interest can indeed influence governments to appear to care. But garnering such interest, as Darfur plainly shows, is a long, drawn-out process, and the move from concern to action can take forever. Pessimists will not be disappointed.

For the record, none of those who betrayed Rwanda has ever faced the consequences. Not a single government has lost an election for allowing hundreds of thousands of Africans to be murdered. Not a single French politician has been held accountable for allowing the genocidaires to escape from Rwanda to Zaire/Congo, thereby setting in motion the catastrophic wars that have since plagued the African Great Lakes region. No one has been called on to resign for their actions or advice. Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir, My Life, calls Rwanda "one of my greatest regrets," and spends exactly two pages in total on the subject. This is truly the globalization of impunity.

Nor did those guilty of sins against Rwanda deign to atone by commemorating the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Kigali in April. Kofi Annan went to Geneva instead. The U.S. sent a mid-level diplomat who offered a derisory handout of a $1 million (U.S.) for orphans, widows, and aids victims. Canada's delegation consisted of a former junior cabinet minister and the ambassador to Rome who advises on things African. Among all Western nations, only the Belgians sent their prime minister to apologize and repent. The Rwandans were disappointed but philosophical; their expectations were low.

None of this can give the preventionists a single reason for optimism. It's true that the Remembering Rwanda movement achieved some success. Commemorations of the tenth anniversary occurred around the world and Rwanda got more media coverage in those ten days than during the past ten years. But even if this attention proves to be sustainable, even if the victims and the survivors and the perpetrators and the "bystanders" are all remembered, what then? We will not have changed. Darfur reminds us that, once more, "Never Again" seems beyond human nature. Too many of us like to cause harm and too few of us care enough to prevent it.

Yet we go on. Why? Maybe because if we refuse to give up, we will stumble across an answer. Maybe because it matters that the victims gain some posthumous dignity. That the survivors will know someone cares. That the perpetrators are reminded that they can run but they can't hide. That those guilty of crimes of commission or omission - the French, the Americans, the Catholics, the Brits - will remember that there is no statute of limitations on accountability, and that we will keep naming and shaming them as long as is necessary. For myself, maybe it's because Carol will be reassured that I emerged from my encounter with genocide gloomier than ever but not ready to surrender. Not yet immobilized. And no less willing than before to throw myself - with the usual modest expectations, of course - into the eternal struggle that the pursuit of social justice and equality has always demanded.

* Gerry Caplan is a Canadian-based public policy analyst and international coordinator of the "Remembering Rwanda" Project. He is also a public affairs commentator and author of "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities To Investigate the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). He is presently co-editing a book on the Rwandan genocide ten years later.

* This article was first published in the October issue of The Walrus, a new Canadian general interest magazine. It is reproduced here with their permission. The Walrus magazine is available on newsstands and book stores in the US as well as Canada, with subscribers from all over the world. For more information about The Walrus:

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Ten years ago, the international community stood by as the horror of the Rwandan genocide unfolded. This summer, Western political will could have stopped the mass killings in Sudan. Why do we not act?

On a quiet Sunday in the early summer of 1999, I was recruited into the tiny but growing army of enigmatic characters who devote their lives to studying genocide. It was a phone call that did it. Stephen Lewis, my lifelong comrade-in-arms and now UN Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, was offering a chance for us to work together again, but on a subject of unprecedented gravity: unraveling the truth about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Rwanda became my obsession from that moment to this. Stephen was a member of a special seven-member International Panel of Eminent Personalities (IPEP), which had been appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to investigate the genocide. Despite their genuine eminence - two were former African presidents, one a potential future president, another the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India - the panel members just didn't know what to do with the information they had been accumulating. After traveling to half a dozen nations interviewing people with links to the genocide, they didn't know what they wanted to say. They decided they needed a writer post-haste. Appropriately enough, they sought an African writer, but for various reasons none of their choices was available. Stephen mentioned me. Though I knew little of Rwanda, I had a doctorate in African history; I'd lived in several African countries; I'd co-chaired two public policy commissions in Canada; I was a writer; and I'd been involved in the struggle against white rule in Southern Africa. I suppose a combination of sheer desperation plus these credentials led to a near total stranger being brought on to take over the panel's task.

As it happens, Stephen and I had already discussed the panel at length. He was thrilled and honoured to have been appointed to it and I was wildly envious. I had gone to live in Africa for the first time as a doctoral student way back in 1964 and had kept renewing my connections over the years. So when the call came, I was willing and able, yet seriously anxious. Carol, my wife, very wise about many things (not least the secrets of my soul), proved so once again. We could cope as a family, she was confident, even if it meant I'd be absent a fair bit. But she wasn't as sanguine about me. Could I deal with the subject emotionally? Could my already dark, lugubrious, pessimistic, Hobbesian view of the world handle such intimacy with one of the most hellish events of our time? After a lifetime dedicated to various crusades for social justice, I'd become the stereotypical glass-is-half-empty guy, always able to find an ominous cloud in a deep blue sky. My gag: being a pessimist may not be fun but at least I'm rarely disappointed. Now, this new assignment raised real fears of me being traumatized into utter depression and immobilizing hopelessness. These were serious questions, but both Carol and I knew immediately they could only be answered after the event. There was no way I could resist this offer. This was history in the making. This was Africa, my life's preoccupation. This was another Holocaust, a subject that had tormented me forever. This was about the very nature of our species. I began getting my shots the next day and reported to the Panel's headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the home of the OAU, nine days later.

I signed up on the assumption that the panel members would tell me what they wanted to say, and that I'd be their pen. This was hardly my usual or favorite role but, under the circumstances, I was prepared to play it. I needed their guidance about how forthright they were prepared to be. Although no expert on Rwanda, I did know how controversial and sensitive the issues were. Since this was an OAU mission, presumably dedicated to offering an African perspective on the genocide, was the panel ready to say that there would have been no genocide at all if some Africans hadn't chosen to exterminate other Africans? How far were they prepared to go in describing the OAU's own failure to intervene effectively? Beyond Africa, were they willing to tell the truth and accuse the French government of virtual complicity in the genocide? Would they agree to condemn Rwanda's churches, above all the Roman Catholic Church, for their shameful betrayal of their flock before, during, and since the genocide? Were they prepared to say that American politicians (both Democrats and Republicans), fearful of losing votes if U.S. soldiers were killed for such a remote cause, had knowingly allowed hundreds of thousands of Rwandans to die terrible deaths? Were they going to tell the truth about the serious human rights abuses that had been committed by the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front - the "good guys" in the genocide and now the government of the country?

To my astonishment, when the panel flew in to meet me in Addis Ababa, they offered no guidance at all. To this day I'm still not sure I understand it. Maybe they were paralyzed by the enormity of the topic and their responsibility. All I know is that after my very first meeting with the members, I was left to produce the report on my own, sending them drafts for approval. I was distraught. How was I to deal with all the vexing issues I had fruitlessly raised?

Waiting for the flight back to Toronto, where I would do all my reading and writing, I went for a long and dusty walk with Dr. Berharnou Abebe, the panel's research officer, a remarkable Ethiopian intellectual with whom I had immediately bonded. Berharnou grasped the situation completely. Like other non-Rwandan Africans I was to meet, he felt personally ashamed of the genocide and approached his role on the tiny panel professional staff with the utmost gravity. We walked and walked, going over the problem again and again, getting grimier and more hoarse with each polluted block. Finally, he stopped, looked at me, and said: "It is simple, Gerry. You must write not for the seven, but for the 700,000. It is their story that you must tell."

Ignoring the murky politics of both the OAU and some of the seven panelists, I accepted Berharnou's advice with a vengeance. I would give them a draft based on wherever the evidence led me.

For almost a year, I immersed myself in the topic totally. I thought of nothing else. Weekends and evenings disappeared. Somehow, I absorbed a wealth of knowledge as if by osmosis. In the end, however, the work was done and approved - even though some panel members were rather less enthusiastic than others in accepting some of my harsh, unforgiving, and thoroughly documented assessments of the French and U.S. governments, the Catholic Church, the UN Secretariat, the OAU itself, the post-genocide government in Rwanda, and just about everyone else involved in this terrible tragedy except Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire, almost alone, emerged with his honour intact. Howard Adelman, a Rwandan expert at York University in Toronto, once wrote that Rwanda's was "the most easily prevent-able genocide imaginable," and the panel unhesitatingly accepted my suggestion that we call the three- hundred-page report "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide." What can never be forgiven is that none of those with the capacity to pre-vent it cared enough to try. The report was released in mid-2000. I don't mind saying the OAU had never seen anything like it - independent, outspoken, undiplomatic, and easily read, it was the very antithesis of the turgid bureaucratic documents the OAU normally spewed out. It was also largely ignored. Not because it pulled no punches, I'm afraid, but out of plain lack of interest. Africa's heads of state, who had authorized the report two years earlier, never bothered to discuss it at all. I was deeply disappointed by the unceremonious burial of the report, suffering from the inevitable anticlimax after such an intense experience, and finding it hard to come to grips with what I had learned. Not only was the assignment over, so, it appeared, was my time with Rwanda. Wrong again.

About a year later, it dawned on me that outside Rwanda itself, the genocide was already being forgotten. I became extremely agitated. The survivors were living as traumatized, maimed paupers. Most of the perpetrators were getting away with murder, often mass murder. The sins of commission of the French government and the Catholic Church, and the sins of omission of the American and British governments, were being completely ignored: the "globalization of impunity" I had called it in the report. Carol, once again seeing things far more clearly than I could, suggested that the tenth anniversary of the genocide in 2004, two-and-a-half years away, could be a natural occasion to renew interest in the tragedy. The result was "Remembering Rwanda," an international voluntary movement organized with no funding, largely on my Mac, with the assistance of Louise Mushikiwabo in Washington and Carole Ann Reed in Toronto, with adherents around the globe, all dedicated to ensuring that the memory of the genocide and its victims would not be buried, and that those responsible for it would not escape accountability. I had already befriended some Diaspora Rwandans who signed up immediately. They included a group of remark-able widows, particularly Esther Mujawayo in Germany and Chantal Kayetisi in New Hampshire, who had lost their husbands, among dozens of other relatives, to the genocide while they and their children miraculously survived, and who are dedicated to making sure the genocide would not be swept under history's table. Leo Kabalisa, one of life's natural gentlemen, was another; Leo, who now teaches French in a Toronto high school, counts by name fifteen members of his immediate family and eighty-two of his extended family who were murdered during the one hundred days.

Other Rwandans, though, were inevitably suspicious. In Johannesburg one night, I met with a group of Rwandan expatriates attached to the Rwandan Diaspora Global Network. I knew them through e-mail correspondence and, finding I had to be in Johannesburg on other UN business, I had asked to meet them. We had a good couple of hours, got along well, and agreed to work together. But it was obvious they couldn't quite figure out why I was doing this. What did I want? What could I get out of this? Rwandans, who have been betrayed by the outside world as much as any people on earth, are entitled to their suspicions of all outsiders.

In trying to explain my interest, I found myself, to my own surprise, telling them that I was Jewish. My family had fled Poland before the Hitler era, I said, and, probably as a result, I had great empathy with their own genocide. It was all true. Although I'm a convinced atheist, deeply at odds with those who represent themselves as the voice of Canadian Jewry, and a passionate foe of Israel's occupation of Palestine, I've always felt my Jewishness deeply. I've been fascinated with the Nazis and the Holocaust since my teen years. For decades now I've read, almost as a matter of principle, at least one book related to the Holocaust every year. Although many Jews disagree, for me the self-evident lesson of the Holocaust is a universal, not a particular, one; it is not merely that anti-Semitism must be opposed with all of our might, but that all injustice, racism, and discrimination is unacceptable and has to be com-bated. The Rwandans loved this answer. Many Tutsi regard themselves, with considerable pride, as the Jews of Africa. Most know about, and identify with, the Holocaust. Some have been to Auschwitz, others to Yad Vashem. Many are far more supportive of Israeli policies than I am. Yet my core Jewishness and our shared genocides is a bond between us.

Sometimes I learn from experience. During a visit to Kigali in 2002, I had the opportunity to address nearly one thousand Rwandans at a major assembly dedicated to reconciliation. I described the Remembering Rwanda movement and asked, before they could: Why was a white outsider, a muzungu, in the widely used Swahili term, leading this initiative? The moment I said that as a Jew I instinctively felt a close bond with Rwanda, the mood in the huge parliamentary chamber palpably changed. Suddenly, trust emerged; we understood each other. The solidarity of victims prevailed. Certainly some suspicion still existed; I could hardly blame them. But after the speech I was confronted by a hand-some, dynamic woman I didn't recognize, who abruptly embraced me. Yolande Mukagasana, a genocide survivor, had made it clear in a brief e-mail that she didn't know why I was involved in this issue, didn't trust me, and could continue the fight for the memory of the genocide's victims without me, thanks anyway. Now, she said, she knew we would be in the struggle together. Yolande, a poet and storyteller and a passionate keeper of the survivors' flame, invited me to dinner later at her small house in Kigali, now home to thirteen adopted children who were kibitzing in a room nearby. As I tried politely to continue eating, she pointed to the photos on the wall of her husband and three young children and explained in graphic detail how, ten years earlier, they had all been hunted down and murdered not far from where we sat.

Gerry Caplan is a Canadian-based public policy analyst and international coordinator of the "Remembering Rwanda" Project. He is also a public affairs commentator and author of "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities To Investigate the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). He is presently co-editing a book on the Rwandan genocide ten years later.

This is the first of a two-part series entitled "The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again". The second part will appear in Pambazuka News 178 next week. This article was first published in the October issue of The Walrus, a new Canadian general interest magazine. It is reproduced here with the permission. The Walrus magazine is available on newsstands and book stores in Canada. For more information about The Walrus:

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Only the ideologically twisted would deny Ronald Reagan his due. He was a wildly successful president, accomplishing a remarkable amount of his agenda.

He entered office in 1980 determined to block advancement for black Americans, to halt the sluggish march towards equality for American women, to make America walk tall again by beating up tiny poverty-stricken nations, to allow insatiable greed and ruthless personal ambition to reap lavish rewards, to fire up the economy through trillions of dollars in defense expenditures, to invite industry to desecrate the environment, and to legitimate a morality in which any means justified his ends.

Notwithstanding his unparalleled laziness, ignorance and immersion in fantasy, in all these areas his administration triumphed, a splendid role model for conservatism in the modern world.

The new values were never in question. This was conviction politics. One of the very first acts of the Reagan administration was to cast the only vote against the World Health Organization's code of ethics on feeding 3rd world babies with instant formula prepared with contaminated water.

The world was Ronald Reagan's movie set. History will debate his role as the man who ended the cold war. But as president, death was the Gipper's co-pilot. Morning in America meant that the United States could aggress around the world at whim, recklessly flouting both American and international law, disdaining such outmoded liberal constraints as honesty, legality, democracy and resolutions of the United Nations. The multi-faceted immorality of the Iran-contra scandal was one direct consequence.

Under him was assembled a team of bellicose conservative cold warriors---CIA director Bill Casey, Oliver North, and an entire semi-secret team of ex-CIA agents, ex-Pentagon officials, fascist Cuban exiles, professional killers and international drug traffickers. State terrorism was the order of the day. The Reaganites organized a succession of secret wars and open attacks on very small nations who paid an appalling price for the unswerving principles of conservatism.

The first target for violent regime change was Nicaragua (population 3 million), in the process causing unspeakable horror as well to hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans whose soldiers the Americans trained in the finer points of torture. He then sent the Marines to Lebanon (population 3 million) to demonstrate that Americans could go wherever they damn well chose; 241 of them died in a widely predicted attack on their barracks. A subsequent CIA plot to assassinate a Muslim leader allegedly linked to the attack didn't quite work out; it missed its target but caused collateral damage to 280 dead and wounded Lebanese bystanders.

Two days after the Marines were blown up, needing to show that no one pushed the US around, Reagan ordered 7000 US troops to invade Grenada (population 95,000), a Caribbean island about 3/4 the size of PEI. As in Lebanon, CIA intelligence proved somewhat faulty: 19 American soldiers were killed and 115 injured, some by "friendly fire". For this gallantry and valour, 8612 US army medals were awarded, some to soldiers who never left the States.

In besieged Angola (population 8 million), Bill Casey of the CIA teamed up with the South African apartheid government he so admired and succeeded in making that country, like Nicaragua, a total basket-case, while tens of thousands of Angolans perished miserably. In the Persian Gulf, an American destroyer attacked without provocation or reason a regular commercial Air Iran flight, killing 290 people; no American apology or reparations have ever been offered.

At home too, conservatism worked its magic. Poverty bloomed. 14 million more Americans lived below the poverty line when he retired than when he was elected. Almost one in four American children in 1988 lived in poverty. The enforcement of civil rights for blacks in housing, voting, employment and education almost ground to a halt. Serious reactionaries were appointed to courts at every level to entrench the rights of the privileged for generations to come. The President travelled to Bitburg, Germany, to lay a wreath at the grave of SS soldiers who, he explained, were victims of the Nazis "just as surely as the victims of the concentration camps". He was a great friend of Israel's extremists and the powerful Jewish-American neoconservative elite adored him.

The old Gipper never lost his faith in Gipperish. Almost his last act in office was to ask Congress to increase the swollen defense budget by another $5 billion and cut the same amount from child nutrition programs and medical insurance for the aged and the poor.

His country loved him. The tributes and tears flow. His truths go marching on.

* Gerald Caplan is a commentator on public affairs

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Those of us who are preoccupied, even obsessed, with commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide are often taken aback when we’re asked what all the fuss is about. After all, just today I received from the Holocaust Centre of Toronto an invitation to join in commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. Not the entire Holocaust, just the terrible Hungarian chapter. Yet memorializing the genocide in Rwanda is never taken for granted in the same way.

Isn’t it already ancient history? Aren’t there all kinds of human catastrophes that no one much bothers with? Didn’t it take place in faraway Africa, in an obscure country few people could find on a map. Wasn’t it just another case of Africans killing Africans? What does it have to do with us, anyway?

These questions deserve answers, not least because some are entirely legitimate. Above all, it is fundamentally true that there would have been no genocide had some Rwandans not decided for their own selfish reasons to exterminate many other Rwandans. But once this truth is acknowledged, a powerful case for remembering Rwanda remains, and needs to be made.

The responsibility to remember:

First, Rwanda was not just another ugly event in human history. Virtually all students of the subject agree that what happened over 100 days from April to July 1994 constituted one of the purest manifestations of genocide in our time, meeting all the criteria set down in the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Genocide experts debate whether Cambodia or Srebrenica or Burundi were “authentic” genocides; like the Holocaust and (except for the Turkish government and its apologists) the Armenian genocide of 1915, no one disagrees about Rwanda. And since genocide is universally seen as the crime of crimes, an attack not just on the actual victims but on all humanity, by definition it needs to be remembered and memorialized.

Second, it wasn’t just another case of Africans killing Africans, or, as some clueless reporters enjoyed writing, of Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu (or Hutsi and Tutu, for all they knew or cared). The Rwandan genocide was a deliberate conspiratorial operation planned, organized and executed by a small, sophisticated, highly organized group of greedy Hutu extremists who believed their self-interest would be enhanced if every one of Rwanda’s 1 million Tutsi were annihilated. They came frighteningly close to total success.

Third, the west has played a central role in Rwanda over the past century. Just as no person is an island and there’s no such thing as a self-made man, so every nation is the synthesis of internal and external influences. This is particularly true of nations that have been colonies, where imperial forces have played a defining role. To its everlasting misfortune, Rwanda is the quintessential example of this reality. The central dynamic of Rwandan history for the past 80 years, the characteristic that allowed the genocide to be carried out, was the bitter division between Hutu and Tutsi. Yet this division was largely an artifact created by the Roman Catholic Church and the Belgian colonizers.

Instead of trying to unite all the people they found in Rwanda 100 years ago, Catholic missionaries invented an entire phony pedigree that irreconcilably divided Rwandans into superior Tutsi and inferior Hutu. When the Belgians were given control of the country following World War 1, this contrived hierarchy served their interests well, and they proceeded to institutionalize what amounted to a racist ideology. At independence in the early 1960s, this pyramid was turned on its head, and for the next 40 years Rwanda was run as a racist Hutu dictatorship. None of this would have happened without the Church and the Belgians.

The Culprits:

Last, but hardly least, the 1994 genocide could have been prevented in whole or in part by some of the same external forces that shaped the country’s tragic destiny. But without exception, every outside agency with the capacity to intervene failed to do so. My own list of culprits, in order of responsibility, is as follows:

-the government of France
-the Roman Catholic Church
-the government of the United States
-the government of Belgium
-the government of Britain
-the UN Secretariat.

I name the French and the Church first since they both had the influence to deter the genocide plotters from launching the genocide in the first place. Rwanda was the most Christianized country in Africa and the Roman Catholics were far and away the largest Christian denomination. Catholicism was virtually the official state religion. Catholic officials had enormous influence at both the elite and the grassroots level, which they consistently failed to use to protest against the government’s overtly racist policies and practices. Indeed, the Church gave the government moral authority. Once the genocide began, Catholic leaders in the main refused to condemn the government, never used the word genocide, and many individual priests and nuns actually aided the genocidaires.

Rwanda was a French-speaking country, and France replaced Belgium as the key foreign presence. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group of English-speaking Tutsi refugees from Uganda, invaded Rwanda in 1990, the French military flew in to save the day for the Hutu government. For the following several years, right to the very moment the genocide began, French officials had enormous influence with both the Rwandan government and army. They failed completely to use that leverage to insist that the government curtail its racist policies and propaganda, stop the increasing massacres, end the widespread human rights abuses, and disband the death squads and death lists.

Two months after the genocide began, a French intervention force created a safe haven in the south-west of the country through which they allowed genocidaires leaders and killers, fleeing from the advancing RPF, to escape across the border into Zaire. From Zaire they began an insurgency back into Rwanda with the purpose of “finishing the job”. Eventually this led to the Rwandans invading Zaire/Congo to suppress the insurgency, which in turn soon led to the vicious wars in the Congo and the subsequent appalling cost in human lives throughout eastern Congo.

Once the genocide was launched after April 6, 1994, the American government, steadfastly backed by the British government, were primarily responsible for the failure of the UN Security Council to reinforce its puny mission to Rwanda. Under no circumstances were these governments prepared to budge. The Commander of the UN force - UNAMIR - repeatedly pleaded for reinforcements, and was repeatedly turned down.

Two weeks into the genocide, the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from 2500 to 270 men - an act almost impossible to believe 10 years later. Six weeks into the genocide, as credible reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths became commonplace and the reality of a full-blown genocide became undeniable, the Security Council voted finally to send some 4500 troops to Rwanda. Several contingents of African troops were put on standby, but deliberate stalling tactics by the USA and Britain meant that by the end of the genocide, when the Tutsi-led rebels were sworn in as the new government on July 19, not a single reinforcement of soldiers or material ever reached Rwanda. This was one of the darkest moments in the history of the United Nations.

As for Belgium, notwithstanding the racist attitudes and colonial behaviour of its soldiers, their contingent was the backbone of UNAMIR. When 10 Belgian soldiers were murdered by Rwandan government troops on the very first morning of the genocide, the Brussels government immediately decided to withdraw the remainder of its forces and to lobby the Security Council to suspend the entire Rwandan mission. Its motive was simple: They did not want to be seen as the sole party undermining UNAMIR. At the Security Council, of course, it found eager allies.

The role of the UN Secretariat is somewhat ambiguous. To a large extent, its failure to support the pleas of its own UNAMIR Force Commander reflected its lack of capacity to cope with yet another crisis combined with its understanding that the US and Britain would not alter their intransigent positions. Still, there were many occasions when the Secretariat failed to convey to the full Security Council the dire situation in Rwanda, and many opportunities when it failed to speak up publicly in the hope of influencing world opinion.

A multitude of betrayals:

It is not far-fetched to say that the world has betrayed Rwanda countless times since its first confrontation with Europeans in the mid-1890s. This previous account has presented several of these betrayals before and during the genocide: by the Catholic Church, by the Belgian colonial power, by the French neo-colonial power, by the international community.

To exacerbate further this shameful record, we need to look at the past decade. First, the concept that the world owed serious reparations to a devastated Rwanda for its failure to prevent the genocide has been a total non-starter.

Second, there has been precious little accountability by the international community for its failure to prevent. The French government and the Roman Catholic Church have to this moment refused to acknowledge the slightest responsibility for their roles or to apologize for any of their gross errors of commission or omission. President Bill Clinton and Secretary-General Koki Annan have both apologized for their failure to offer protection, but have both falsely blamed insufficient information; in fact what was lacking was not knowledge - the situation was universally understood - but political will and sufficient national interest. No one has ever quit their jobs in protest against their government’s or their organisation’s failure to intervene to save close to one million innocent civilian lives.

Those we must not forget:

Finally, the very existence of the genocide has largely disappeared from the public and media’s consciousness. This is the latest betrayal. Marginalized during the genocide, Rwanda’s calamity is now largely forgotten except for Rwandans themselves and small clusters of non-Rwandans who have had some connection with the country or specialize in genocide prevention. That’s why I founded the Remembering Rwanda movement in July of 2001. I had four targets for remembering: the innocent victims; the survivors, many of whom live in deplorable conditions with few resources to tend to their physical or psychological needs; the perpetrators, most of whom remain free and unrepentant scattered around Africa, Europe and parts of North America; and the so-called “bystanders”, the unholy sextet named earlier. Rather than being passive witnesses, as the word “bystander” implies, all were active in their failure to intervene to stop the massacres, and all remain unaccountable to this day. It is time the Rwandan genocide is treated with the concern and attention it so grievously earned.

* Gerald Caplan is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000), the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the founder of "Remembering Rwanda: The Rwanda Genocide 10th Anniversary Memorial Project".

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

Around the world, commemorations of the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide are about to be launched. The central actors responsible for allowing Hutu extremists to perpetrate the genocide are well known: the government of France, the United Nations Security Council led by the USA with British backing, the UN Secretariat, the government of Belgium, and, by no means least, the Roman Catholic Church. The Organization of African Unity also refused to condemn the genocidaires and proved to be largely irrelevant throughout the crisis. As a consequence of these acts of commission and omission, 800,000 Tutsi and thousands of moderate Hutu were murdered in a period of 100 days. Reviewing the events of those days, I find myself thinking not once but repeatedly: It's almost impossible to believe that any of this actually happened. The following is a selection of some of those events. They, and the lessons they suggest, are worth bearing in mind as we who refuse to let the memory of the genocide dissipate begin our commemorations of the 10th anniversary.

1. Time and again in the months prior to and during the genocide, the Commander of the UN military mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) pleaded with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York to expand his very limited mandate. The only time his request was ever approved was in the days immediately after the Rwandan president's plane was shot down, triggering the genocide. UNAMIR was then authorized to exceed its narrow mandate exclusively for the purpose of helping to evacuate foreign nationals, mainly westerners, from the country. Never was such flexibility granted to protect Rwandans.

2. Heavily armed western troops began materializing at Kigali airport within hours to evacuate their nationals. Beyond UNAMIR's 2500 peacekeepers, these included 500 Belgian para-commandos, 450 French and 80 Italian troops from parachute regiments, another 500 Belgian para-commandos on stand-by in Kenya, 250 US Rangers on stand-by in Burundi, and 800 more French troops on stand-by in the region. None made any attempt to protect Rwandans at risk. Besides western nationals, French troops evacuated a number of well-known leaders of the extremist Hutu Power movement, including the wife of the murdered president and her family. All non-UNAMIR troops left within days, immediately after their evacuation mission was completed.

3. From the beginning of the genocide to its end, no government or organization other than NGOs formally described events in Rwanda as a genocide.

4. From beginning to end, all governments and official bodies continued to recognize the genocidaire government as the legitimate government of Rwanda.

5. The months of the genocide happened to coincide with Rwanda's turn to fill one of the non-permanent seats on the Security Council. Throughout those 3 months, the representative of the government executing the genocide continued to take that seat and participate in all deliberations, including discussions on Rwanda.

6. Almost all official bodies remained neutral as between the genocidaires and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the mostly Tutsi rebels in the civil war that was being fought at the same time as the genocide. As if they were morally equivalent groups, both the genocidaire government and those fighting to end the genocide were called upon by the UN, the Organization of African Unity and others to agree to a cease-fire. They did not call on the genocidaires to stop the genocide. Had the RPF agreed to a cease-fire, the scale of the genocide behind governemtn lines would have been even greater.

7. Only days after the genocide began, 2500 Tutsi as well as Hutu opposition politicians crowded into a Kigali school known as ETO, where Belgian UN troops were billeted; at least 400 of them were children. They were seeking protection against menacing militia and government soldiers outside the compound. In the midst of the stand-off, the Belgian soldiers were ordered to depart ETO to assist in evacuating foreign nationals from the country. They did so abruptly, making no arrangements whatever for the protection of those they were safeguarding. As they moved out, the killers moved in. When the afternoon was over, all 2500 civilians had been murdered.

8. After 10 Belgian UN soldiers were killed by Rwandan government troops the day after the Rwandan President's plane was shot down, Belgium withdrew all its troops from the UN mission. So that Belgium would not alone be blamed for scuttling UNAMIR, its government then strenuously lobbied the UN to disband the mission in its entirety.

9. Two weeks after the crisis had begun, with information about the magnitude of the genocide increasing by the day, the Security Council did come very close to shutting down UNAMIR altogether. Instead, led by the USA and the United Kingdom, it voted to decimate the mission, reducing it from 2500 to 270.

10. After the deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia in October 1993, the United States decided to participate in no more UN military missions. The Clinton administration further decided that no significant UN missions were to be allowed at all, even if American troops would not be involved. Thanks mostly to the delaying tactics of the US, after 100 days of the genocide not a single reinforcement of UN troops or military supplies had reached Rwanda.

11. Bill Clinton later apologized for not doing more to stop the genocide. However, his claim that his administration had not been aware of the real situation was a lie.

12. French officials were senior advisers to both the Rwandan government and military in the years leading to the genocide, with unparalleled influence on both. Virtually until the moment the genocide began, they gave unconditional support as well as considerable arms to the Hutu elite. Throughout the 100 days and long after, French officials and officers remained hostile to the “anglo-saxon” RPF, whose victory ended the genocide. To this day the French have never acknowledged their role nor apologized for it.

13. After 6 weeks of genocide, France, which offered no troops to the UN mission, suddenly decided to intervene in Rwanda. Within a week of the decision, Operation Turquoise was able to deploy 2500 men with 100 armored personnel carriers, 10 helicopters, a battery of 120 mm mortars, 4 Jaguar fighter bombers, and 8 Mirage fighters and reconnaissance planes---all for an ostensibly humanitarian operation. The French forces created a safe haven in the south-west of the country which provided sanctuary not only to fortunate Tutsi but also to many leading Rwandan government and military officials as well as large numbers of soldiers and militia---the very Hutu Power militants who had organized and carried out the genocide. Not a single person was arrested by France for crimes against humanity. All were allowed to escape across the border into then-Zaire, entirely unrepentant and often still armed. Predictably, these genocidaires were soon launching murderous excursions back into Rwanda, beginning a cycle that led to the subsequent bloody conflict that destabilizes central Africa still.

14. France long remained hostile to the post-genocide government in Rwanda and sympathetic to the previous French-speaking Hutu regime. Many of the leaders of the new government were from English-speaking Uganda and were considered the “anglo-saxon” enemy by the French government. In November 1994, barely four months after the end of the genocide, Rwanda was deliberately excluded from the annual Franco-African summit hosted by France. Zaire's President Mobutu, who had been ostracized by the French government in recent years, was invited, as was Robert Mugabe, the anglophone president of anglophone Zimbabwe.

15. The Roman Catholic Church in Rwanda was the largest and most influential denomination in the country, with intimate ties to the government at all levels. It failed to denounce the government's explicit ethnic foundations, failed to denounce its increasing use of violence against Tutsi, failed to denounce or even name the genocide, failed to apologize for the many clergy who aided and abetted the genocidaires, and to this day has never apologized for its overall role. The Pope has refused to apologize on behalf of the Church as a whole.

16. Within months of the end of the genocide, relief workers and representatives of the international community in Rwanda were telling Rwandans they must “Quit dwelling on the past and concentrate on rebuilding for the future” and insisting that “Yes, the genocide happened, but it's time to get over it and move on.”

17. George W. Bush, during the campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, was asked by a TV interviewer what he would do as president if, “God forbid, another Rwanda” should take place. He replied: “We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our own strategic interest. I would not send US troops into Rwanda.”

18. The new Rwanda Patriotic Front government inherited a debt of close to $1 billion, some of it incurred by the previous government in genocide preparations---expanding its army and militias and buying arms. After the genocide, the RPF was obligated to repay in full the country's debt to its western lenders.

19. Following the genocide, the World Bank was left with a $160 million program of aid to Rwanda that it had extended to the previous government. . Even though the new government was penniless, the Bank refused to activate that sum until the new government paid $9 million in interest incurred by its predecessor. A Bank official told a UN representative: “After all, we are a commercial enterprise and have to adhere to our regulations. “ The sum was eventually paid by some donors.

20. In the first nine months after the genocide, the donor community provided $1.4 billion in aid to the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire and Tanzania. Since, as was universally known, genocidaires had taken over the camps, a good part of these funds went to feed and shelter them and to fund their re-training and re-arming as they planned cross-border raids back into Rwanda. For Rwanda itself, while donor funds for reconstruction were generously pledged, in the first year after the genocide only $68 million was actually disbursed. To this day, Rwanda has never received reparations remotely commensurate with the damage that the international community had failed to prevent.

21. Once the genocide ended, the UN military mission was finally expanded. As UNAMIR II, it remained in Rwanda for almost two more years as a peacekeeping force, costing the UN $15 million a month. But the main challenge had become less one of peacekeeping and more one of peace-building--- the reconstruction of a totally devastated country. UNAMIR had the equipment, the skills and the will to play a major role in reviving the country's shattered structures. What it lacked was the mandate and modest funding from the Security Council to perform such a role. But UN headquarters never sought such authorization from the Security Council, nor did the Council ever initiate such a move.

22. When a UN mission leaves a country, it follows a formula to determine how much of its equipment should be left behind. UNAMIR owned much desperately needed equipment, from computers to vehicles to furniture. When the mission wrapped up in April 1996, both UN officials in Kigali and members of the Security Council urged UN headquarters to interpret the formula with maximum generosity and flexibility; they believed that 80% of all non-lethal equipment should remain in Rwanda. UN headquarters announced that 93% of all equipment was to be transported out of the country for storage or use elsewhere . After much pressure was applied, the UN bureaucracy decreed finally that 62% of all equipment be removed.

23. So far as is known, not a single person in any government or in the UN has ever been fired or held accountable for failing to intervene in the genocide. In fact, the opposite is true. Some careers flourished in the aftermath. Several of the main actors were actually promoted. We can consider this the globalization of impunity.

24. Despite the unanimity of every major study undertaken and in the face of the testimonies of survivors and the first-hand accounts of international humanitarian workers in Rwanda at the time, denial of the genocide persists. Deniers include Hutu Power advocates, many of them still active in western countries, as well as lawyers and investigators working for Hutu clients at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Denying the Rwandan genocide is the moral equivalent of denying the Holocaust.

* Gerald Caplan is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000), the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the founder of "Remembering Rwanda: The Rwanda Genocide 10th Anniversary Memorial Project".

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NOTE FROM PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORS: This year is the 10th Anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, an event that, as Gerald Caplan so succinctly summarises, was marked by the failure of the international community, complacency, neglect and, in some cases, outright collusion. An international campaign is underway to mobilise to mark this anniversary - "REMEMBERING RWANDA". As our contribution to this campaign, we will be featuring a section called Remembering Rwanda (see below). We also plan to publish a special issue on Rwanda in April 2004. Get involved! Organise an event in your institution, town, village or city. Send us information about what you are doing to commemorate the anniversary and to provide solidarity to the rebuilding of Rwanda."

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